A journal of art + literature engaging with nature, culture, the environment & ecology

The Lilies and a Hoe

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.

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