GOPAL LAHIRI

GOPAL LAHIRI

Numbness

They are in lock down,

whirling, spilling between the life and death.

The deadly virus swallows all prayers

fear is spreading in silence.

dead leaves are in heaps on the roadside.

They peer out to the roads, they walk day and night

those migrant workers, their families, little children

unborn babies walk in the wombs,

They want to go back to their roots

in the thatched house, tree shades, hyacinth ponds, paddy fields

water birds flutter across the bridge

The families are buried by hunger

they walk miles, exhausted, starved, die on the road accident

blood on the asphalt, on the broken pavements, on the soil

Faceless figures of pain and wound hover around

eyes turn into blood orbits, tears are incrusted

Their voices are muted,

asleep now, echoes calling them into the dreamland.

And every morning the death lists are out

we bolt more tightly our doors, our windows

we are numbed to the outside world.

©gopallahiri

Recovery

I am still alive, I cannot believe-

the tubes are taken away, the bandages are cut

beams of blue light shine down and rove over my eyes,

Someday even the smile of the doctors also worries me

I am scared that someone may wash away in my absence

the quasi-mural images drawn on the white wall,

Making their black script under the moonlight

those hurried notes of goodbyes and condolences

pile up all around in silence.

I have folded them away

beneath the alphabets of death.

The night is beautiful now, so the faces of everyone

the sound of applause rejects those memories of grief,

I am always tender with the mornings, filled with

the tweets of tiny birds,

reimagine the world like Monet’s ‘Water Lilles’.

©gopallahiri

New Paradise

Behind the horizon the light is spraying.

the sky trembles like a tear,

as if aurora lights open,

the feathered summer withers.

through the leaves a forlorn dew is falling down.

Moving from one place to another

the moons ride over planets in a pastel,

the colour of love-red roses, draw some design

deadened by the weight of weighting,

to my dreams in your name.

Of the earth groping to its roots

quenching the thirst of the unmarked soil,

it’s the heightened senses that reveal

an infirmary of flowers of the field

cast out from the new paradise.

©gopallahiri

GOPAL LAHIRI

GOPAL LAHIRI is a Kolkata- based bilingual poet, critic, editor, writer and translator with 20 books published mostly (13) in English and a few (7) in Bengali, including three joint books. His poetry is also published across various anthologies as well as in eminent journals of India and abroad. He has been invited in various poetry festivals including World Congress of Poets recently held in India. He is published in 12 countries and his poems are translated in 10 languages.