Poems by Shubhabrata Banerjee​

Digging, MMXIV

(after Seamus Heaney and Amos Oz)

They have corns in and on their hands
noon-shadow, hard, indomitable
stoops to hit the ground— seeds sprout.

They invoke their gods who carry
cornucopias flaunting letter-press
drafts and grains and whatnot.

Old men, older habits, oldest symbol
of fertilization. Some with a spade,
some with a pen, wade through years

of memory and of silence asking
'Is there really anybody here?'
Generations bend over page and paddy.

I am the son of your taste
I squawk and squeak, I squat
before your goddess, her rough hands--

not copious— bless me enough, kind
arrows of functions, leading deeper
I am the engraved future.



On Writng

I started late.
Ink-pots dried up, broken nibs tethered to vacuum.
You can see ghosts of white sheets memorising darkness.

Who is to blame?
Mines and shadows deter, ocean of consonants
rises up to the eighth column of rainbow, passionate.

Children of ants march on
pots hang from the hands of clocks;
eyes downcast, scurrying for a safe haven,

I listen to the stars
followed by vowels' shackled paean
they say, implode implode. My mother-tongue betrayed me.


Translated by the poet

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Shubhabrata Banerjee is a staff writer at Desh and the author of Sudure Bajichhe Bnasi: Pashchatya Sangeet-e Rabindranath (a monograph on the influence of Tagore's works on western classical composers) and five books of poems.

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