Poems by Sonnet Mondal

Guerrillas
 
Look
how they walk together: our heralds
as guerrillas scream for food in huts
with crumbled breasts
clinging onto the lips of baby skeletons
 
NO, there isn’t anything dark in it.
 
The stars are brighter than ever today.
Each one as intense and unwavering as the pole star
crowding beside the streets of our national gate.
God bless their firmness!
 
We are still wondering
seeing you two in our national television,
if we can ever see our reflection
in the polished skin of those escorting cars behind you.
 
Smiling in a stance which you might term Satanic
we are walking with earth above our head.
The vanity cars:
they will surely show us our faces,
once these roads are complete.
 
Seeing how we look then,
we will surely laugh
like guerrillas.


Around my Karma
 
Let me hang my body and rotate around this tree
wearing the bangle of wild flowers.
I will win the ear to hear
the song of moths, grasshoppers, horses, tigers, cows and giraffes
and step into a common song of earth.
 
It’s a rotation through which I will win the vision
to see the smiling stance of beaks and
pain in the snarling canines.
 
I am a singer without voice
Without beat and tune
Without a tone that deserves claps.
 
Still I have perceived and learnt the unheard songs
and I am the chosen one to sing today
being one with the wild cactus, nodding roses
and ever dancing trees that rotate me
                                    around my Karma.

(First published at the McNeese Review, Mcneese State University followed by the Six Seasons Review, Bengal Foundation)

About the poet

Sonnet Mondal is the founder of The Enchanting Verses Literary Review and currently serves in its editorial board. He has authored eight collections of poetry and has performed on invitation at Struga Poetry Evenings, Macedonia in 2014 and Uskudar International Poetry Festival, Istanbul in 2015. Most recently he has been invited to deliver talks at the XII International Poetry Festival of Granada, Nicaragua, in 2016.
 
Sonnet is currently one of the featured writers at International Writing Program at The University of IOWA-Silk Routes Project funded by Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. Sonnet was featured as one of the Famous Five of Bengali Youths in India Today magazine in 2010 and was long listed in The Forbes Magazine’s top 100 Celebrities 2014 edition among India’s most celebrated authors. Later in March 2015 The CultureTrip website, London listed him among the Top Five Literary Entrepreneurs of Indian English Poetry. He serves on the editorial board of Levure Litteraire and writes as a guest author for Business Insider.
 
His works have been included in The Mcneese Review (Mcneese State University), Common Ground Review (Western New England University), The Sheepshead Review (University of Wisconsin, Green Bay), The Penguin Review (Youngstown State University), Two Thirds North (Stockholm University), Connotation Press, Nth Position, Burning Word literary Journal, The Adroit Journal, Fox Chase Review, The Stremez (Supported by The Ministry of Culture, Macedonia), The Thing Itself Journal (Our Lady of the Lake University, Texas) and California State Poetry Quarterly (California State Poetry Society) to name a few.
 (Website www.sonnetmondal.com)