SIPPING LETTERS
Photo: Karan Madhok
Poem by Sayani Mukherjee: ‘where Jargons kept our brew alive and we sat cross legged with armours high up from howling screams’
I sipped your letters out of my chamomile tea in the autumn of November when the tea leaves, soaked heavily with the fog of my sighs, tasted like burned milk and my lips flamed through burning the letters into the basement of your closed doors. That dim night the avenging wind churned the bricks of the opaque walls of your hollowed loneliness with its azure streaks and then the double rainbow mirrored a glass of you. Stealthily, I stood up in front of the mirror, shadowed in the night bulb of the room. My visage watched the shadows grappling the other and your tall and proud shades of oak tree commingled with my slippery, shimmering rose petals. With my vulnerable and spoilt hands I confess, I played too often with Fancy - our erect bookshop of stripped hibiscus walls where each of us wrapped a case for the other - with your Ginsburg and Chomsky and my Nietzsche and Plath, where Jargons kept our brew alive and we sat cross legged with armours high up from howling screams, from fuzzy black tulips that buzz the world in greys, from the thick system of logos and the demons of Apollo. In the end, we left and the cups stayed there, half sipped with letters.
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Sayani Mukherjee is a poet and a researcher, hailing from Chandannagar, a former French colony in West Bengal. She received her post-graduation degree in English from Banaras Hindu University. An ardent love of literature, her works have appeared in various reputed international and national magazines and journals. Currently she is part of the international anthology of poems 'Paradise on Earth'. She likes to engage her leisure in photography, cinema and arts. You can find her on Instagram: @_sayani__mukherjee.
