Inheritance, from Loss
Photo: Karan Madhok
Poetry: ‘I dig / Into my memoir platter / where shrouded instructions / wrestle with unhealed wounds.’
I dream
of a sun-kissed veranda, an old sofa set,
photographs and fluttering curtains.
I dig
Into my memoir platter
where shrouded instructions
wrestle with unhealed wounds.
I hear
Ma’s shrill dictates
drowned in the aroma of freshly sauteed Sunday mutton.
Smoky oven concretizes into my old man’s dried skin.
The pungency of steaming hot mustard oil,
oozing out from the oval shaped, mini aluminium bowl,
transforms Bapi’s withered skin.
Freshness drowns the rusticity of primitive gesture.
I fear
the fire touching the fair skin of my origin.
In a role-reversal, I rub dried, stubborn ghee all over.
Magically, the blackness of the injuries vanish.
I observed
how lifelessness, like life, needs nourishment.
I move on
to the crystalline frigidity of the blue sky;
hopes and aspirations peep behind the greyish clouds
emitting from the electric chimneys.
Like an alarm, the heart-wrenching siren
harnesses the tempest raging inside.
I realize
I must mend the broken walls of my ancestor’s place.
In the Palace of my Mind
unfinished tasks set new horizons
and fill the keyholes of misery with love.
***
An Editor of three books and a member on the review boards of several international journals, Antara Mukherjee is a part of West Bengal Educational Service, Govt of West Bengal. She is presently teaching at the Department of English, Durgapur Govt College, WB.
