‘Monsoon Markets Metaphors’ and other poems
By: Kushal Poddar
Monsoon Markets Metaphors
On the monsoon mossy market wall
sun lays down its merchandise
one by one. Already tired are its flesh.
Clouds gossip about the imminent reclining.
The shine stares me blind. I am here with my
wife, a better bargainer and a worse spender.
We pass the shops, toddle together
through the throng towards the storm
marking the exit. All wet in the drizzling,
our hair prolonged-release rain
as if its medicinal cool might solve living.
We stroll, hand in hand, towards the gate.
We have too many hands by now
burdened with the debris of another life
for our offspring.
###
Gardening with My Daughter
Sun rays erect a wall
behind us,
and on that canvas
I and my daughter
paint an orchard.
The bonsai town
sprawls around.
Our garden is the giant.
I have seeds on my palm.
Our voices explaining
soil and sun sink the traffic
of the toy cars left beyond
for this moment.
###
By The Pricking of Our Thumbs
The peril, as miniscule as nothing,
came home, this one, the red brickwork,
and you carried it in
your intestine.
Grandfather, I know what it means
to know not to know, why the leaves
crack to dust at the slightest rubbing of fingers,
and ageing stops, dark darkens,
the howling wind shepherds the clouds away.
One shakes his head at those failing premonitions,
and at the success of the prickings of our thumbs.
In one phrase, I too, not know.
We live through the history, naive.
Our deaths mark pandemics.
Or war. “Choose your perils.” No supreme being offers.
###
On Voices
I
The echo-based voices,
unborn ghosts,
seek their origins within
my head, and
the calendar says – the week
has only opened.
II
During an unguided tour
of a calendar-gaudy village,
I step on the spot
the painter forgot to paint.
The vacation haunts the desk.
Where the digits lie,
it is still a Monday,
and the voices name the God
we have not invented yet.
III
Fog reigns the heart of my head.
Seven voices, each for one day,
moor their vessels.
Was it a fine passage?
I ask. None answers.
They, forever alive
and unborn in utero,
never sail beyond.
the footsteps work on the planks.
A wet sound shames the rain
sometimes I experience.
###
An author, journalist, and father, Kushal Poddar, editor of ‘Words Surfacing’, authored eight books, the latest being ‘Postmarked Quarantine’. His works have been translated into eleven languages.
