Jharna Sanyal | Poetry and Art
Poetry and art by Jharna Sanyal and Partha Pratim Roy: ‘Sometimes I walk out of my skin / in search of the duck pond where / moss green water plays with thirsty branches’.
Kadam Tree
Art: Partha Pratim Roy
Kadam-
is the name
of Indian monsoon
singing itself mad.
Run your fingers gently
along the kadam leaf-
Krishna's flute tunes in
to flow through your veins.
Radha's soulful longing
finds wings in your eyes
perching among the flowers.
And, the raindrop –
between your fingers
transforms -
Yamuna, doped with the heady fragrance in the air...
her ecstasy blooms into golden orbs of white whispers.
The eternal life of the tree -
stories weave beyond the instant.
*
The Duck Pond
Art: Jharna Sanyal
Sometimes I walk out of my skin
in search of the duck pond where
moss green water plays with thirsty branches -
trees loosening themselves to touch the shy ripples.
A couple of ducks floats in utter disdain of the
other worlds of madness and terror.
My words don't lure them,
my urge to be healed does not bring them any
closer than the utterly indifferent water lilies...
They will be here in spite of me.
I will go back in spite of the ducks
and the pond and the lilies, and wear
my skin and fit into it as never before.
Yet, each night the Duck pond overflows
into my dreams with the water lilies and all.
*
***
Jharna Sanyal is a painter, bilingual poet, short-story writer, and formerly a Professor of English at Calcutta University. Besides her contribution to various journals and magazines, she has published a collection of translations, The Magic Web and Other Stories: Ashapurna Devi on the Widow and her World (Orient BlackSwan, 2012) and a collection of poems, The Nomadic Trail (Rubric Publication, 2019).
