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Saturday, February 10, 2024

New Poems: Kushal Poddar




On A Slow Gloaming


To Rijurekh da


The thin light from the window

sniffs, recognises the smoky petrichor

rising from my mellow core.  

In the garden I buried my lies, fed by kitchen rot grows

a Pinocchio reed.

If you stare hard; eyes blur; 'I' dissolves 

freeing you to see more in one, how a reed holds 

some infinite reeds, possibilities, 

as if a lie can be true when its turn arrives.




On Our Seventh Anniversary


A frayed postman

wearing a threadbare flat cap

delivers a letter you posted

seven years ago.


I offer him a dream.

He chooses coffee instead.

He leaves; I open the envelope,

and grasshoppers

from the heartland green 

hops out of the creased within.


I remember - we've declared 

them to be the national beings

of our Republic of Mind.


You are asleep. I whisper,

"They are alive."




Cat's Tongue, House No. One Hundred And Ten


The lane makes a bottleneck.

We have a name for the narrow isthmus;

we forgot that; perhaps the lane's purpose

is to pour the world into the house at the end,

No. One hundred and ten.

I desire to apprehend if you still live there,

keep the books you borrowed from me

decades ago on an evening remembered

for hidden feelings, fog muffled streetlights

casting unstable shadows of us on my celadon wall.

My mother coughed and coughed as you depart.

I recall you bent, hands fisted, books in your tote.

You didn't acknowledge that you would not return, 

no one could. We stopped and watch a starling caught

in the orange cat's maw. The cat spoke 

with its mouth full. I didn't know the tongue.


The Ghost of Democracy


The children's parade

led by a white eyed man

whose wand tilter rotates

and performs as a guiding baton 

passes.


The morning lies thick on the skin.

Even the starlings in

the moist grass observe airy sombre.


Future nears the middle ground

where a leader will summon

the ghost of democracy and

the roads, streets and lanes will

shiver like a Ouija board.




The author of 'Postmarked Quarantine' has eight books to his credit. He is a journalist, father, and the editor of 'Words Surfacing’. His works have been translated into twelve languages, published across the globe. 

Twitter- https://twitter.com/Kushalpoe

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