Everything We’ve Become: Four Poems by Goirick Brahmachari
Photo: Karan Madhok
Poetry: ‘Love is like the wild lilacs, white / Apple trees over green meadows, / Riverstones I have walked over / For years— splattered, irate, broken.’
Affection
It is not a chase in the dark
No, not the misery one grows to like
In lack of validation or calm.
Not a treaty with aloneness
Nor is it the departure
From the rules drawn out.
It is there. Like water.
Mundane, like an everyday pursuit
True and soft, somewhere within.
*
Rivering
Where I always wanted to go
Is where I have always been
Reaching, ever extending
Flowing, yet not entirely flown.
Still the day breaks, the dew
Melts, the hunger
Grows within, chores
Thicken, the monotony
Of life and afterlife; miseries
And commentaries
On the state of the statecraft,
Witchcraft, collective sins.
A stone, a river
An afternoon ripple:
Syllable.
Where I always wanted to go
Is where I have always been
Ever reaching, extending
Flowing, yet not entirely flowed.
*
Lilac
Love is like the wild lilacs, white
Apple trees over green meadows,
Riverstones I have walked over
For years— splattered, irate, broken.
Like tall old trees, frost
Over snow flowers and white weeds
The hum of the river, undisturbed
As it were, always there.
*
Sermon
And everything you wanted
Is everything we’ve become
And everything you wanted
Is everything that became.
And all that you destroy
Is all that is destroyed—
And all you created was already there
And everything you wanted
You appropriated, and all you created
Was already there.
And everything you wanted
Is everything we’ve become
And everything you wanted
Is everything that became.
***
Goirick Brahmachari’s third book of poems, Wet Radio and other poems was published in 2017. His recent poems have appeared in Berfrois, Portside Review, The Bombay Review, Mad Swirl, Madras Courier and Nether among others. Nightwalkers (a collaborative volume of verses along with Debarshi Mitra) was published in 2022 by Writers Workshop, Kolkata.
