Sekhar Banerjee, Kolkota, India
I should have told you beforehand
that I have not kept any pebbles in my shirt pocket;
they are postal correspondence of the brooks
and the streams; let them circulate ad infinitum. Mountains, too,
have now some other thing to do like feeding night to a hen
so that it can crow in the morning, full of noise
of the lilies and a hoe.
In your voice I trace a whole city, its buildings and billboards.
Traffic signals blinking in all the wrong directions.
But an ascent is never green; it smells of mulberry
and alum. If you have ever climbed a mountain,
touching its Adam’s apple, sorrow, its primitive ferns,
flint, its armpits and ambition—
you would have known it is insomniac.
I know a descent is speed.
It takes all that we have—the breath
from our memory, the fire from our toes,
the second part of our night, predicates from our voice,
and I still hope
to trek to a mountain in spring
on an island, east of the straits of Malacca, again.
Sekhar Banerjee is a bilingual writer. He has four poetry collections and a monograph on an Indo-Nepal border tribe to his credit. He lives in Kolkata, India.