Sekhar Banerjee

This is a month of taking stock
of inclusion and silence
yet again
and trying to set up the sky, part by part,
above us every night
ahead of Christmas

when juxtaposition
is our only source to identify each other
before a long winter starts

The sky never waits to see
how we are
The emerging fog and the lost sky
are now sewn together
with cotton clouds and blankness
all over us
like an abandoned tent with a red
apple and darkness

We are lost in the winter forest
trying to search
the missing constellations one by one-
Taurus, Aquarius, Gemini, Sagittarius

and identify the broken pieces
of the male and the female stars
before we can feel the lost constellations
again on our lineless palms
and rewrite a winter memorandum
on Christmas

We know the sky functions like the eye

of the galaxy that has tiny specks of planets moving
near its cornea because
the universe is one-eyed

like my second private tutor in high school and he liked
the Hitchcock movie- The Birds,
with subtitles

and he often looked at the crows
in Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with a magnifying glass
to learn more about life,

sky, planets, birds, and the universe
which continuously looks at us

I take one eye from my second private tutor
and the other from the universe

Early morning is the first paraffin
of the sun – white, clear like a headache;
It melts down the earth
and softens the grass
I am lost

Lying face down in the tender
furrows of my soft green pillows like
the furrows
in the grass, I am the end of this all

This is my home
I listen to
endless morning chants
of worms and millipedes

I am one of them in the morning,
hiding
for some more darkness

I yawn at my physician’s chamber
It is again the same all over
He treats me

for all the wrong ailments
The evolution of my paper skin, my sleeplessness
and the maroon bones and the blue fingertips
and my brittle rib-cage

I realize nowadays
He never gets tired of my sickness

He is an odd man, a liberal conservative
Every week I watch him
getting old in his dispensary

of hand wash, masks and maladies
I know
he is now treating me for my lost shadow

Sitting at a roadside café in Calcutta
I note preparations
for the carnival not very far. The idols

of the Gods and the Demons
dry under the tarpaulin canopies
in the serpentine streets and blind alleys
unfinished

After a long time in the wilderness
where the roots of the trees entangle with
the unlettered sleep
and the clouds hung over roofs
unabridged

I came back to the old city of ornate
manholes and dilapidated frontage
and empty bookstores for some ordinary solace

like the smell of clay Gods and
the Demons with green
skin in the middle of buses honking and
parks flowering