LOPA BANERJEE

 

 

At The Crossroads

 

At the crossroads, searching my way

Through the confluence of the east and the west—

Am I born anew, in sweltering desire to converge my being

With the dust of my ancestral ashes, melting into the shores of the Atlantic?

 

Running along, galloping between airports,

My senses were tickled with the rush of stranger bodies,

All divergent, all moving, swaying in fluid directions,

I walked past my old seasons; the new brushstrokes of the earth were mine.

 

And then, I descended, in splinters of my native past,

And then, the silken airs of assorted lives, variegated colors swished past me.

I became all the colors of wilderness and calm, stretching my way up

Up above my roots, spreading my ethereal wings to fly, fly high.

 

Two decades at the crossroads, bodies and souls in divergent rhythms,

Clouds and raindrops of cacophonous voices have dissolved within me.

My Baishakh melodies and my orchestrated tunes of early spring, my spirit blood Of Ashwin and my wild call of the autumn have converged, as if a ritualistic dirge.

 

The seed of mixed pleasantries exchanged amid the distance of seven seas

Sings in the full-bodied language of a tree,

Not a single note is lost, not a single beat led astray.

 

A Sweet Breeze

 

A sweet spring breeze ushers in,

the scent of newly brewed poetry.

Words, syllables, meters play hopscotch

in my indulgent lyrical mind.

By now, I think I’ve got along with all of them,

some smudged lines of my native Bangla,

a smattering of long-learnt Hindi, splattered splotches

of a few Spanish words, and then,

the flickering and blazing breaths

of the English I learned and unlearned,

clutching on, hard, unrelenting.

 

There, the sweet summer breeze catches up again,

and all those mangled syllables

become my muse, in equal measures,

in crisp, succulent bits of joy, in throbbing pain.

“Saat somudro tero nodeer paar” (across the seven seas

and thirteen rivers)—

My folks back in my native Bangla town said,

My ‘home’ will be bloating in the myths

of known truths and an alien rage.

Picking and choosing my memories well,

my canvas paints them all in vibrant, volatile brushstrokes.

 

Diversity, the two decades-long music I listened to,

letting their roots grow on me, in a mammoth home,

a universe spreading its overwhelming tapestry on me.

A sweet breeze of fall ushers in, the bounty and melancholy,

the voyage of fragmented, haywire, acquired languages,

and I lap it all up, like a hungry, exuberant flame. 

 

LOPAMUDRA BANERJEE

 

LOPAMUDRA BANERJEE is an acclaimed author, a bilingual poet, translator and editor, and also a writing mentor/faculty of literature and composition, living in Dallas, Texas with her family, but forever rooted to Kolkata, her city of love. She has authored and co-edited/co-authored a total number of 16 books and anthologies till date. She has received many literary honors and recognition over the years of her writing journey, but her best prize till now is the love of her readers and her fellow humans.