Winter Solstice 2022: An anthology of Indian poetry on The Chakkar
Photo: Karan Madhok
In a special anthology curated by Ronald Tuhin D’Rozario, nineteen luminary Indian poets respond to the winter through verse. ‘In this odour of detachment, December somehow develops a quiet stir of emptiness inside. It gently teaches the importance of slowness, just like dropping a semicolon between sentences.’
And because it is about the winters here, all over again. I look at its greyness. Just like the monsoons, it develops a sense of fatigue: long-fatigue, short fatigue, middle-class fatigue, fatigue after making love, and the fatigue of grief.
To winters E.B. White, writes: “At this season of the year, darkness is a more insistent thing than cold. The days are short as any dream.”
I wonder where the year’s loyalties lie. Certainly, as it was promised in the beginning, the year exhausts itself, bending its head low like flowers with lost life, lost love, and lost bodies. Humans are conditioned to get attached to something that we have known or are familiar with. And so, a sense of sadness looms in the heart during this phase of estrangement with the year, of having shared a close and distant live-in-relationship for a while. It carries away a part of our lives with it.
But what I have always found is that, even though the winter solstice is short-lived, within it sleeps a strange feeling between home and remaining homeless. In this odour of detachment, December somehow develops a quiet stir of emptiness inside. It gently teaches the importance of slowness, just like dropping a semicolon between sentences.
The year has surely failed to deliver us the things we had hoped for, in many, many ways. Yet, it’s still difficult for us to bid farewell. Thus, in the anatomy of our consciousness, as we begin this intimacy of detachment and a tirtha through the barrenness of winter, I invited a few writers and poets to connect their interpretation with this falling season through poetry.
Rochelle Potkar looks at the season’s descent and decadence, “One life asking questions: the other answering it. If all lives were a tale of anguish between their acts, which is the life to feel the light? Which life is an interval over anguished skin? A caesurae or brink?”
In her reflections, Vinita Agrawal affirms that the warmth of heart is there to stay. “Those coals, those ashes shall not freeze. / They shall forever be stoked to painful life.”
Mallika Bhaumik looks back at life during this winter solstice. She says that the body is like the migrant season, “The fatigued saga of the body becomes the dying cinders of the chullah, / reserving the warmth of the day”.
Nabina Das speaks of lost winter and its intimacy in her poem, weaving the lines in her dreamy magical way:
White dust on an ebbed white stealth:
why’s winter made to look flake-white?
Just bright enough to send the sky
in throes of a chill. There's so much
in the broken pebbles slow-starched
in the mellow slants, or the lack of it.
There’s so much in leaps of sun-catching.
Through the poetry of Barnali Ray Shukla, a vividness of winter and the imagined protagonist breathes life:
Eyes restless by the window,
translucent, stalk a white winter
Silhouette of your chin
towards my address
Curtains of my eyelids are drawn
I miss the cleft
And in this same way, all the writers and poets in this anthology profoundly interpret this season through their verses. I am genuinely grateful to each of the nineteen writers and poets who contributed with their unique elucidations of this coldest season.
Amidst winter and its aloneness, it is an absolute privilege to curate this anthology in collaboration with The Chakkar. I express gratitude especially to Karan Madhok, the editor, for giving me this space to bring all these wonderful poems together.
In faith, faithlessness, and a conclusion, yet one more time: all that we consumed, consumes us. We learn to value what we have lost this year. And with all the remainder that we wish to keep unspoken about. Alvida.
Warmly,
Ronald Tuhin D'Rozario
The writers and poets on ‘Winter Solstice 2022: An anthology of South Asian poetry on The Chakkar: Ashwani Kumar, Barnali Ray Shukla, Basudhara Roy Chatterjee, Bhaswati Ghosh, Gopal Lahiri, Jonaki Ray, Mallika Bhaumik, Nabina Das, Nishi Pulugurtha, Poorva Trikha, Rochelle Potkar, Ramesh Gauri Raghvan, Shikhandin, Sahana Ahmed, Smita Sahay, Smitha Sehgal, Sanjeev Sethi, Sekhar Banerjee, Vinita Agrawal.
*
Winter Solstice: A Poetry Anthology, 2022
Sew
Rochelle Potkar
Khairlanji. The darkness of humanity percolates into corners over the skins of the mother and her daughter, those sons, the father. The darkness of the witching hour. Indigestible truths consumed in brittle cognizance.
When history has reasons, explanations for genocidal waves, blind rage of the immeasurable...
appropriations of pain, Khairlanji can be explained away, reasoned with, rationalized. Like the light kissing the cheeks of another morning of other lives when we held cappuccino cups and beheld the sun smelt into a wealthy smile.
The ferris wheel of souls. Khairlanji: Casablanca. Hathras: Havana.
One life asking questions: the other answering it. If all lives were a tale of anguish between their acts, which is the life to feel the light? Which life is an interval over anguished skin? A caesurae or brink?
Water wheel: the stops at those stations, where electricity hasn’t reached. Auschwitz.
One life in Hathras. The other thinking of it.
compost, last stage - darning the patchwork to the zillionth hour
Fictionist, poet, and screenwriter, Rochelle Potkar is an alumna of Iowa’s International Writing Program and a Charles Wallace Writers fellow, University of Stirling. She is the author of Four Degrees of Separation and Paper Asylum shortlisted for the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2020. Her poetry film Skirt was showcased on Shonda Rhimes Shondaland. Her poetry readings also feature on Disney+ Hotstar/ Shorts-English. Her most recent works are a short story collection Bombay Hangovers and a co-authored a bilingual cross-translation of English/Marathi poetry: The Coordinates of Us/ सर्व अंशांतून आपण.
*
Boy On A Boat
Shikhandin
Ice-lipped air dips over sea. The crested wake follows
the boy. Billowing after him. White-trimmed cloak.
Stitched from swathes of flowing emerald.
Young skin, new stubble on chin. The boy embraces the wind.
His face sky turned. Where the Pole star sits. That sky,
his sky, is mantled with winter dusk,
descending around him.
The boy races his boat. Wind sculpts his hair. Shapes
the surf. Riffles dusk’s ruffle, and the brine
crimped froth. The salt-kissed air.
Indian author Shikhandin’s books include After Grief – Poems (Red River, India), Impetuous Women (Penguin-RHI), Immoderate Men (Speaking Tiger), and Vibhuti Cat (Duckbill-Penguin-RHI). Her honours include, runner up George Floyd Short Story Contest 2020 (UK), Pushcart nominee by Aeolian Harp (USA) 2019, Pushcart nominee by Cha: An Asian Literary Journal (Hong Kong) 2011, Winner 2017 Children First Contest curated by Duckbill in association with Parag an initiative of Tata Trust, First Prize Brilliant Flash Fiction Contest 2019 (USA), Runner up Erbacce Poetry Prize (UK), Winner 35th Moon Prize (Writing in a Woman’s Voice: USA), First Runner up The DNA-OoP Short Story Contest 2016 (India), Second Prize India Currents Katha Short Story Contest 2016 (USA), First Prize Anam Cara Short Fiction Competition 2012 (Ireland), Long list Bridport Poetry Prize 2006 (UK), and Finalist Aesthetica Poetry Contest 2010 (UK). Shikhandin’s prose and poetry have been widely published online and in print, in journals and anthologies worldwide.
*
A Dekabrist* Poem
Raamesh Gowri Raghavan
The nights get shorter now.
Someone, somewhere
writes poems.
Someone, somewhere
stands in the rubble of their house
with half a teddy bear
to remember their daughter by
waiting for the aid truck
to give them a sack of flour
and a dozen potatoes.
The cold gets a bit colder though.
Someone, somewhere
grows roses.
Someone, somewhere
nurses an asthmatic six-year old
draws the windows tight
wonders about air purifiers
and hopes the smog will
by some miracle, spare them.
After the aphelion, the sun
achieves a modicum of boldness.
Someone, somewhere
makes snowballs.
Someone, somewhere
looks at the unseasonal rain
looks at the fallen mango flowers
and then looks at their bills
for school and loans and old parents
that summer will not pay.
The winds bring sea spray home.
Someone, somewhere
makes a cuppa tea.
And hopes somehow,
that with a smidgeon of milk
and scraped up sugar
will keep hunger from their child
as the floods recede.
Someone, somewhere,
will see the equinox.
Someone, somewhere,
will not see the equinox.
*Dekabrist: Someone who participated in the December Revolution of 1825 in Russia, which happened around the winter solstice.
Marketer by profession, scientist by training, and poet by night, Raamesh Gowri Raghavan is editor of the literary e-journal Narrow Road and a member of the editorial board of Café Haiku. His literary publications include poems, short stories, haiku and haibun in several magazines and anthologies. He organized “Distilled Images”, a national conference on haikai literature in India in 2014 with SIES College. Currently, he is coordinating the Diploma in Buddhist Studies at the India Study Centre (INSTUCEN) trust.
*
I don’t remember my lines
Barnali Ray Shukla
November snowflakes
falling, some fallen
like maple leaves
red by the lakeside
Eyes restless by the window,
translucent, stalk a white winter
Silhouette of your chin
towards my address
Curtains of my eyelids are drawn
I miss the cleft
Snowflakes don’t walk alone
they slide down the lapel
some lost, few find
winter smoke-rings
of your breath
Your fingertips leave embers
on the snow, molten
your charcoal stare
my smudged grays
our first pregnant silence
waltz.
Verbs wake up alone, varnished
by the sandpaper of time
scratch ebony
of the empty ballroom
Sharp, staccato flamenco
smoke up a dusty silence
No care for approval
…that space
A cloud of rising falsetto
dances with possibilities
bruise our silence,
you still don’t speak
I don’t remember my lines
today. You forgot to hide
your wedding ring.
Barnali Ray Shukla is a filmmaker, writer and a poet. Her writing has featured in Sunflower Collective, Out of Print, Kitaab.org, OnEating, Madras Courier, Bengaluru Review, Indian Ruminations, Vayavya, The Punch Magazine, The Brown Critique, Kaurab, Usawa Literary Review, Gallerie, Portside Review, Anthology of Contemporary Indian Poetry II, indianculturalforum.in, Indian Quarterly, Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians (Sahitya Akademi), The World That Belongs To Us (HarperCollins India), Have a Safe Journey (Amaryllis), Side Effects of Living (Speaking Tiger), Hibiscus (Hawakal), Open Your Eyes (Hawakal), The Kali Project (Indie Blu-e Publishing), Converse: Contemporary English Poetry by Indians (PippaRann Books & Media), Borderless, Voice & Verse, UCityReview, A Portrait in Blues, and Centre for Stories. She has two feature films as a writer-director, three documentaries, and two short films, as well as a book of poems, Apostrophe (RLFPA, 2016). She lives in Mumbai. Her new Hindi feature film, Joon, premiered in September 2022 in Bolivia.
*
Fostering
Gopal Lahiri
I come to this balcony in a cold night,
You blow a breeze, breath into my mouth,
You wrap your hands tight around me and smile
in the sound of dry leaves, I can count them all,
Knowing you are not there, I do not stop to speak
to my universe, bridging hurting gaps in nature
the moon leans over a bamboo bridge,
I often bend down to collect your footsteps
with the smell of absence and cry alone,
Now nights carry fragile memories, wild laughter,
white winds summon wintriness, tiny birds
sit on the transmission wire, they are lot
like love and light telling me to grow
with the daylight in winter solstice.
Gopal Lahiri is an India based, bilingual poet, critic, editor, writer and translator with 27 books (17 in English and 10 in Bengali) published, including eight jointly-edited books. His poetry has been published across anthologies and journals of India and abroad. His poems are translated in 16 languages and published in 12 countries. He was nominated for Pushcart Prize for Poetry in 2021. He is the recipient of the Poet of the Year Award in Destiny Poets (UK, 2016) and Setu Excellence Award 2020 (Pittsburgh, U.S.A.). His latest collection of poems Alleys are Filled with Future Alphabets received the 2022 Ukiyoto Award, 2022.
*
Winters
Sanjeev Sethi
I have accepted incarcerations in my mind
as injunctions of a worthy gavel. I have briefed
myself to breathe crisp air but tendrils of uncertain
brumal exhalations twine with my today. It pushes
me to believe we are a sum total of our cantles. I wonder
why we assign significance to some sections.
Will it help if I tell myself, burgees of your
hauteur trouble, while you in hibernaculum go on
without expiating? If living were as simple as a palinode,
we would still be turtledoves. Not remembering
is a way of telling oneself it did not happen.
Brutal echoes are best treated this way.
Sanjeev Sethi has authored seven books of poetry, including Strokes of Solace (CLASSIX, an imprint of Hawakal, Delhi, July 2022) and Wrappings in Bespoke (The Hedgehog Poetry Press, UK, August 2022). He has been published in over thirty countries. His poems have found a home in more than 400 journals, anthologies, and online literary venues. He is the recipient of the Ethos Literary Award 2022. He is the joint-winner of the Full Fat Collection Competition-Deux, organized by The Hedgehog Poetry Press, UK. He lives in Mumbai.
*
Winter Solstice
Vinita Agarwal
Frost’s first blade has pierced the dying autumn;
leaves shall fall, lie buried in snow.
The king of light shall grow dim.
Animals shall hibernate, hide deep down
until spring glitters on their brows again.
The Northern solstice shall render branches bare,
foliage twirl to the ground, hug the paling earth,
a soft sigh escapes the bark of a thinning tree,
Valencies of seasons shall autograph everything
except the fires smouldering deep inside the heart.
Those coals, those ashes shall not freeze.
They shall forever be stoked to painful life.
Though the day shall pass as the shortest of the year,
the night shall slither like a wet thread
pulled through needle of an aching cosmos.
Vinita Agrawal’s latest book Twilight Language is the winner of the Proverse Prize 2021. She has authored five books of poetry. She is poetry editor with Usawa Journal. She has edited an anthology on climate change. She is on the advisory council of the Tagore Literary Prize, the G100 (India) and WICCI. Her books include The Natural Language of Grief, Two Full Moons, Words Not Spoken, The Longest Pleasure, and The Silk Of Hunger. She has edited or co-edited the collections Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English, and Open Your Eyes, Nazki - the poet from Kashmir.
*
Winter Solstice 2022
Poorva Trikha
Sometimes Winter comes,
right in the midst of summer,
biting cold, a blizzard to the heart;
It fogs up reality,
with chilly frostbites.
At least a hundred and thirty-five,
died morbidly in India,
as the Morbi bridge collapsed
flakily, inspiring a chilly distrust.
Thousands of wild animals
forced to migrate, or burnt away,
in North American wild-fires,
in uncounted numbers.
At least a hundred and ninety-six
got coldly washed away
in European flash floods,
slushed, mercilessly.
Harsh moments such as these,
send gusts of shivers down the spine,
overcasting the pleasant breeze or
or the ignorant sunshine,
with frigid atrocity.
It’s humans’ declination of goodwill,
that brings on perpetually in gardens of Eden,
or in jungles of the world,
or in the rivers of gentle motion,
a frosty winter solstice.
Poorva Trikha is a senior Assistant Professor of English at GGDSD college, Chandigarh. She has been writing poetry since the age of 12 and has published three books: Leftover Ink, Photojournalism, and Worded Void. Her poems have been published in many journals including The Tribune, The Criterion and Muse India. She was awarded the 21st Century Emily Dickinson Award in 2022 by Bookleaf Publishing house. Her fourth book of poem, Ellipses, is under publication by Leadstart.
*
Love at Plato’s Cave
Ashwani Kumar
There is no fire nor any shadows here.
We mate with aging hibernal languages –
Prisoners of memories
All ineffective, all flawed.
When we reach the orgasmic end of the cave
I push aside the vegetable dyed silence of burial mound—
Smell the famished hunger for truth, light and soft.
A sudden flash of insanity overcomes us.
In fury, in anger, in fear—
We deep-throat our imperfections and sufferings.
I am not sure
If this is alchemy or pseudoscience of love—
But when we come out in the sunlight
We endure darkness more ruthlessly!
Ashwani Kumar is a Mumbai-based poet, author and academic. Widely published, anthologized and translated into Indian and foreign languages, his major poetry volumes include My Grandfather’s Imaginary Typewriter and Banaras and the Other.
*
Blue Christmas
Sahana Ahmed
sharing my last cigarette with her
tasting her five o’clock lipstick
i look up at the ceiling
and think the same old thought
time to end this thing
for once be true
say goodbye
tell her
now
the cigarette passes between us
the last ever thing we may share
the smoke is a cloud of doubt
i see her troubled brow
i need to leave now
i’ll beg later
but today
she is
free
Sahana Ahmed is a fiction writer and poet based in Gurugram, India. Her work has been published, most recently, in Madras Courier, LiveWire, Outlook India, and The Well-Earned (Hawakal, 2022). She is the author of Combat Skirts (Juggernaut, 2018), a bildungsroman based in the Calcutta of the nineties
*
The Gaze
Nishi Pulugurtha
White clouds playing
Against the blue sky
And the white peaks appear
and disappear to appear again
In the village below
The lady at work in the field
A truck carrying two huge plastic tanks
of water moves in and out
cattle fodder readied in homes
someone chopping dry branches
to be stocked up
some sitting in the warm sun
an old woman knitting
another at her loom
Just another day.
Nishi Pulugurtha is an academic and writes short stories and poetry, on travel, film, food and Alzheimer’s disease. Her work has been published in various journals and magazines. Her publications include a monograph on Derozio (2010), a collection of essays on travel, Out in the Open (2019), an edited volume of essays on travel, Across and Beyond (2020), two volumes of poems, The Real and the Unreal and Other Poems (2020) and Raindrops on the Periwinkle (Writers Workshop Kolkata 2022) and a collection of short stories, The Window Sill (2021).
*
The Longest Night
Jonaki Ray
The rain keeps falling. The sky patches darkness as if
a splotch of gray has been diluted on a watercolor sheet.
The lamps beneath peepal trees flicker, timed by the knitting needles inside.
Smoke and smog combine the air into a combo—with mustard oil, an extra flavour.
The watchmen and Snowy, the lab-mixed-with-everything neighbourhood
mascot and the marathon evening walkers huddle around the bonfire made
of twigs, leaves, crushed egg cartons, and old newspapers as
‘Shortest Day Longest Night Today’ headlines
ash one word at a time,
while colourful sweaters- and-parkas-clad and apple-cheeked people smile in the pics,
postcarding happiness from (almost) another planet, where everything and
everyone is clean and white. It is only now that you understand that without darkness
what is broken will never be healed through light, just as the longest night
will one day be followed inevitably by the longest day.
Jonaki Ray was educated as a scientist, worked as a software engineer, and is now a poet, writer, and editor. Her work has appeared in POETRY, Poetry Wales, The Rumpus, Indian Literature, and elsewhere. Honours for her work include Pushcart and Forward Prize nominations, as well the 2019 Iceland Writers Retreat Alumni Award and First Prize in the 2017 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Contest, ESL. Her poetry collection, Firefly Memories, is forthcoming from Copper Coin. A poetry chapbook, Lessons in Bending, will be published by Sundress Publications in Spring 2023.
*
Weaving Winter
Mallika Bhaumik
The charakha spins the seasons
the length of the fabric stretches beyond autumn
the threads intertwine to form troughs and crests of life.
The dipping mercury coughs,
while her calloused hands, feeble retina do their best to adjust.
Her shrivelled skin is a palimpsest of time’s whimsicalities
The chiaroscuro of alleys shape-shifts before her eyes,
the surge of monsoon,
her moist earth,
green spreading into the nooks and crannies of her being
seeds of life splitting and sprouting out of her navel,
the cries of babies,
the swell of hunger,
the fatigued saga of the body becomes the dying cinders of the chullah,
preserving the warmth of the day.
The mist of cataract settles over dreams of long ago.
The patchwork of her quilt becomes the foreword to the wintry tales
she lives to weave.
Mallika Bhaumik has been a nominee for the Pushcart Prize for poetry in 2019. Her debut poetry book, Echoes (Authorspress) received the Reuel International Prize for Best Debut Poetry Book in 2017. Her second poetry book is How not to remember by Hawakal Publishers.
*
Winter Solstice
Bhaswati Ghosh
i
Tired of its own tyranny, the sun seeks
premature retirement. The world tunes
in to an evening sonata, the notes of
which persist like Dali’s memory.
Animals move deeper into the earth,
it’s hollow warming them with patient
hunger. The early man starved from
midwinter to spring. Skinny, fearful,
the farmer slaughtered his cattle to save
feeding the animal. Killing for survival,
our earliest preoccupation. The sun died,
too, to give the earth rest.
Separation is the sauce that bastes love best.
ii
Through wretched winter breaths,
the tenuous marriage between
sun and soil becomes a needy
association. Winter harnesses man’s
lust for survival by usurping day every day.
Darkness as mammoth as a mounting
snowbank builds its nest, inside, outside.
Waiting is its only salt. The sun slowly returns,
its glow a newborn’s cheeks. Fire seems
realistic, within reach. The hearth is kindled,
hope stoked, hot crepes ladled with palm jaggery
dropped onto plates.
Hearts warmed up, well fed, satiated for another lap around the sun.
Bhaswati Ghosh writes and translates fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Her first book of fiction is Victory Colony, 1950. Her first work of translation from Bengali into English is My Days with Ramkinkar Baij, for which she received the Charles Wallace (India) Trust Fellowship at the British Centre for Literary Translation in the University of East Anglia. Bhaswati’s writing has appeared in several literary journals, including Literary Shanghai, HELD, Cargo Literary, Pithead Chapel, Warscapes, The Maynard as well as in Indian Express, Scroll, The Wire, and Dhaka Tribune.
*
Return of the Sun
Smitha Sehgal
When you, the celibate God atop the mountain explode into a flame of Makara Jyoti* in the eastern sky,
Ripening into Winter Solstice,
In the immortal cycle of birth and death, I bleed sunlight for three days, draining into the blue vessel of Butterfly pea flowers and fate lines of cynical shooting stars
In our folklores, you slay the coarse water buffalo demons of Summer lurching on my skin, making me a woman, as you had promised in timeless hymns
In the frost of your withdrawal, they anoint me a Goddess† bereft of desires, yet
The treacherous night draws me beyond the ancient cold stones of the temple of incarceration,
Forty-one days shrouded in black, penance of Ash smeared on my forehead,
At times becoming a child, tracing memory in grains with curled fingers;
Other times old in wrinkled lemon skin of this crusted eternal wait,
Climbing the eighteen steps leading to your sanctum sanctorum,
Carrying oil lamps and twin coconuts, calling out your name, seeking refuge from the dark growing within me,
Becoming a sea of vowels, a flutter of approaching cobalt breeze, the trumpet of wild tuskers amok in the forest of Palash,
Forbidden,
I see your lotus eyes in the sky aflame, calling you Beloved in breach of sanctity,
Unearthing the roots, dissembling into five elements
I wash up ashore in another nomadic dream by the wharf at Cape of Comorin, becoming
Return of the Sun in Winter Solstice
* Lantern on the sky (symbolizing the deity) lit by tribes of the forest.
† In the voice of Maalikappurath Amma, slayed in her earlier incarnation of Mahishi by the celibate deity of Sabarimala.
Smitha Sehgal is a legal professional in the Oil & Gas Public Sector Undertaking of the Government of India. She writes poetry in English and Malayalam. Her poems, fiction and book reviews have been featured or are upcoming in contemporary literary publications such as Reading Hour, Brown Critique, Kritya, Muse India, The Wagon Magazine, Usawa Literary Review, Parcham, Madras Courier, Water Video Mag, Poetica Review UK, EKL Review, The Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Arkana, Plum Tree Tavern, The Criterion, Kalakaumudi, Samakalika Malayalam, Kalapoorna, ShadowKraft, Da Cheung (Korean Literary Journal) and anthologies including 40 Under 40: An Anthology of Post-Globalisation Poetry and Witness: Red River Book of Poetry of Dissent.
*
The Margin
Sekhar Banerjee
White rose plants lazily climb
the window sill
of the local church. A cat arches its back
after a nap
on the broken pieces of the winter sun
They always fall off
in the courtyard
The mountains are not visible now
They are asleep
even before winter solstice’s longest night
You often think of turning into a snail,
a wood frog, a new man
and sleep through the whole winter dreaming,
only monochromatic dreams
But you enter domesticity;
a sudden chill in the wind
whispers what is lost and what you can still
expect on a daily basis:
buying winter vegetables from the local market,
the warmth of a fresh blanket, the scent
of freshly cooked food, a sleep
of the colour of a new finger nail
This far you can go before a carnival,
finally; this is your margin
This is not spring
Sekhar Banerjee is a Pushcart Award and Best of the Net nominated poet. The Fern-gatherers’ Association (Red River, 2021) is his latest collection of poems. He has been published in Stand, Indian Literature, The Bitter Oleander, Ink Sweat and Tears, The Lake, Better Than Starbucks and elsewhere. He has a monograph of an Indo-Nepal border tribe to his credit. He lives in Kolkata, India.
*
A Ghazal Tonight
Baudhara Roy
The wind has rehearsed all it will say tonight.
In the lanai of your indifference, it lay tonight.
The thrifty dark had hoarded a hope from day.
It is oiling wicks of despair to pray tonight.
On my shore’s stillness, hours come and go.
Creased by time, this life shall fray tonight.
There is no resting place to be found for the soul.
Let it cleave on the wisdom of a ray tonight.
Can something wean me away from myself?
I barter colour in bazaars of grey tonight.
Memory is a currency I must spend all of, now.
In tomorrow will be lost all love’s array tonight.
I haunt, last survivor in this valley of faith.
Tell me, whose trust shall I betray tonight?
Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College affiliated to Kolhan University, Chaibasa. Author of three collections of poems, her recent poetry can be read at RIC Journal, Outlook India, The Dhaka Tribune, EPW, Madras Courier, Live Wire, among others. She loves, rebels, writes, and reviews from Jamshedpur, Jharkhand.
*
One Lost Winter and the Aftermath of Baby-Sex
Nabina Das
White dust on an ebbed white stealth:
why’s winter made to look flake-white?
Just bright enough to send the sky
in throes of a chill. There’s so much
in the broken pebbles slow-starched
in the mellow slants, or the lack of it.
There’s so much in leaps of sun-catching.
So much disintegrating, because hurry.
In the stretch of a dull saw-dust day
our sights laden with minutiaes still.
We are somewhat halved like oranges
somewhat dripping in the loss of all love
chasing shadows like swallows on rails.
Instagrammable wasn’t instant recipe
Our split searchings were not called posts.
White dreams over stark white sheets—
the aftermath of baby-sex swaddles us:
‘You must lie down, not rise, not wash.’
I cannot wipe the resin down my thigh-bark.
‘You must double up, let the fish spawn.’
But I want to swim my own length, bring
spring, make the wintry moves joy-like.
‘You must know winter is for it to churn.’
But I say, you must know, whither charm
when tendrils close, and you lose dreams?
There’s no running away here to warmth...
We think it billows in our hearts, seam-
lessly to our longing’s frantic stream. All
that’s whited-out is not winter here. A cue:
make all that’s hidden our lover all night.
Nabina Das is a poet and writer based in Hyderabad. She has published several poetry collections, a short story volume, and a novel. She is the editor of Witness: The Red River Book of Dissent Poetry and has co-edited 40 Under 40: Poetry of Globalisation. Her latest poetry collection Anima and the Narrative Limits is just out from Yoda Press, and her first book of translations Arise out of the Lock: 50 Bangladeshi Women Poets in English appeared from Balestier Press, UK, in early 2022.
*
Winter Solstice
Smita Sahay
Pale petals whisper in a pool of waning gibbous,
his mouth measures time in the pulsing of her wrists
spreading fireflies like rumours, willing Venus to ascend.
Her hair curls in his fingers, his cheek seeks her throat.
She wants to hold his face. But this season of eclipses
even the sun will be lost. Shadows will incite the ocean
darkness will freeze his heart. In his perfect silence
she will build a cathedral to their kiss –
a mausoleum whose spires will shimmer in moonlight.
She will call it home for her shattered heart.
But days will have mercy – they will come to a close, and
nights – days’ shadows – will clot into a bruise.
Smita Sahay served as Associate Editor for Veils, Halos & Shackles: International Poetry on the Oppression and Empowerment of Women. Her works have appeared in national and international journals, newspapers and anthologies. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Usawa Literary Review, and the Poetry Editor for SPEAK, the Magazine. A visiting faculty of Creative Writing at Whistling Woods International, Mumbai, she is often examining her experience of growing up across mining towns in Jharkhand, India in her writings.
***
Ronald Tuhin D'Rozario studied at the St. Xavier's College, Kolkata. His articles, book reviews, essays, poems and short stories have been published in many national and international online journals and in print, including Cafe Dissensus Everyday, Narrow Road Literary Journal, Kitaab, The Pangolin Review, The Alipore Post, Alien Buddha Press and 'Zine, Grey Sparrow Press, and more. He writes from Kolkata, India. You can find him on Instagram: @ronaldtuhindrozario and Twitter: @RTDRozario.
