By Sayan Aich Bhowmik

Elsewhere

I remember last winter
Reserved for sighing milky-ways into the fireplace
I ran into someone at the marketplace
Where lonely men display their solitude in crystal jars
Someone, wearing the same perfume
That you smeared on yourself after a shower.
The highways that have howled at midnight
Sat between us, waiting for the spring to melt.
As you carefully uprooted every milestone
And brought down every lighthouse
That could have led me to you,
I turned around
And even though the highway and the spring
Were the same,
They just led somewhere else.

Mask

When I write in Urdu
The words drag themselves from the right
Like children taken to school
Against their will.
The letters set up camp
Lighting a fire
With the remains of their discarded brothers.
In the evening, they sit by a stream
The surface of which is polished mercury.
And whisper sad songs to each other.
Halfway through the poem,
An unruly couplet wanders off
To a nearby village
And returns smelling of,
Grandmothers' shawls.
The others, having already reached the end
Exchange their masks
And prepare to walk again.

Sayan Aich Bhowmik is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Shirakole Mahavidyalaya, Kolkata.  A published poet, he is also the editor of the blog Plato's Caves, a semi-academic space for discussion on life, culture and literature.

The representational image is by Simon Matzinger and is downloaded from unsplash.com