LOPA BANERJEE
Places You Can
Find Love
My search for
love
The language of
lost want
Amid dwindling
supplies.
Yet there are
places you can find love
In sudden hungry
flames, in ashes and bones.
In sudden sunlit
dens,
In dark,
superfluous corners,
Dream children
float around, I quietly shut my eyes.
Yet there are
places you can find love
In inarticulate
car rides, amid provocations and violations.
You know the
landscape of my nights by now,
The swallowing
silence of my moments
Behind locked
doors, when our words bleed our chards.
Yet there are
places you can find love
In the pages of
our familiar earth, I move around, awkward.
For ages, we have
wandered amid remembered winds
Inhaling cities
and skies and the places of our birth
Striving to find
the moorings of our skin, the traces of our scars.
Yet there are
places you can find love
You caress my
sin, lost in liberation, when our dark bodies converge.
True Love Meets
Poetry
True love, I say,
is a fucked-up form
An intersection
between flesh, rhythm and melody.
Moments of
becoming, then unbecoming
Overdosed love
letters and a hundred pre-deaths
Translated as
rhythmic reminders
Of the best of
you, the best of me, both of us
Floating in our
torrid sea, learning the art
Of bleeding,
learning to be free in the art of estrangement.
A true and free
verse, I say, is a fucked-up love story
An explosion of
failed rhymes soaked in disorderly brine
A lover, a
dancer, a king or queen of bitterness and dark melody
Striving to write
stories of raging silence, the revolution of dying.
A dreamer of an
embryo, swimming in the motherly belly of memories
And pain, a jazz
singer entrapped in displaced music, notes flowing
Music of wounded
souls, wet, amorous bodies of staggering words
Drenched in the
dark rain, when it rains sometimes,
In the badlands
of lethal poetry.
True love meets
free verse, sonnet and the river poems of Sufi poets.
They talk about
torrents and explosion, wronged births of poetry Gods
And divas, and
dive in the cosmic water-bodies of soulful melancholy.
Free verse, the
petrichor of rhymes are reborn in the nakedness of despair.
The Earth She
Holds
[A poem born instantly
and instinctively today from my humble pen as my daughter Sharanya worked on
and finished an artwork/sketch of a human hand holding the wonder and miracle
of hope, a universe of mountains and verdant green. Hoping of the resurgence of
our planet, this is our small collaboration as a tribute to the people of this
planet who, I know, will soon rise from despair into a new dawn of hope. ]
Atoms of
consciousness spurt, breaking open
In the sunlight
of eternity.
Through membranes
of the fertile brain,
The soft core of
the earth resurges,
pushing through
the ragged, rickety truths of
Diseased,
war-stricken humans.
The earth, in her
diaphragm of hope and orange blossom of planet love
The earth
cocooned in supple hands, a legacy
Of mountains and
unborn plants in embryo.
Her mirth and
persistent dream of this earth,
Yet to be born,
is not a scream, a dissent.
It is rather, a
vision of a wordless world, submerged, a green song.
The earth, like a
cradle she holds, stumbling into poems of lovelessness
The earth in our
sheltered living room,
Waking up from
the wreckage of its ashes.
All Rights Reserved.
Lopamudra Banerjee. June 22, 2021
LOPA BANERJEE
LOPA BANERJEE is an author, poet, translator, editor with six
books and four anthologies in fiction and poetry. She lives in Dallas, Texas
with her family, but is originally from Kolkata, India. She has been a
recipient of the Journey Awards (First Place category winner) for her memoir
‘Thwarted Escape: An Immigrant’s Wayward Journey’, and also a recipient of the
Woman Achiever Award (IWSFF, 2018), the International Reuel Prize for Poetry
(2017) and International Reuel Prize for her English translation of Nobel
Laureate Tagore’s selected works of fiction (2016). Her nonfiction essays,
fiction and other writings have been published in various journals, e-zines and
anthologies in India, UK and USA. She is also a consulting editor for Blue
Pencil Publishers, India. Recently, she has been a featured poet at Rice
University, Houston and her poems have also been featured at Stanford
University’s ‘Life in Quarantine’ project recently. She has co-produced the
poetry film 'Kolkata Cocktail' directed by Shuvayu Bhattacharjee, where she has
also featured as one of the lead actors. Her works are available on her website
www.lopabanerjeewrites.com and also in Amazon.com and Amazon India.
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