By: Mitali Chakravarty

Boimela

At Boimela, young
guitars sing poetry.
Gaiety fills the air.

Boys and girls
are everywhere.
Book lovers meet
in pages: some
find true love:
some dig deeper,
mazed by magic
mists or mantras.

Here languages
greet across the
streets. Writers
launch words in
rockets to explore
the skies, meet
stars till a sun
stuns, exploding
to birth a freshly-
fledged Universe.

Books find lovers
caress their spines,
their souls. They
shimmer, adored.

(First published in Calcutta to Kolkata: City of Dreams — Poems, Hawakal Publishers, 2025)

Crossing at Dumdum

Amidst the traffic beeps,
crowded paths and cars,
Tagore and Nazrul smile.

The muezzin calls and
temple bells chime together,
reverberating a sense of peace.

Chinsurah

Lanes run higgledy-piggledy
looking for the shores of Hooghly.
Houses sprout plants.
Blue totos ride by the riverside.

History flows in its veins,
mingled with strains of
Portuguese-Dutch lores.
Stories of yore lap the waves.

By the shores, songs of rebellion
were sown to inspire centuries.
Deep in a dungeon, a rebel poet
wept lyrics that still stir hearts.

Now as the woman haggles
for her toto fare, or the man
smokes by an ancient edifice,
do they recall that past?

Has History lost itself in the by-lanes
of subsistence, the need to eat,
live and find refuge?
Homes crumble in developers hands.

The river calmly continues to flow
through cities that come and go.
’Twas centuries of changes that
made us so. The river was, is,
and, hopefully, will be…

*Bankim composed Vande Mataram by the Hooghly in Chinsurah – a song the rebels in his novel adopted. The ‘rebel poet’ was Nazrul jailed in Chinsurah.
Ref: https://thumbprintmag.in/single_post.php?id=revisiting-chinsurah

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Mitali Chakravarty lives in a tropical island spinning webs with words. She has three books of poems, Flight of Angsana Oriole (Hawakal, 2023), Cities, Nomads & Rocks (Gibbon Moon, 2024) and From Calcutta to Kolkata: A City of Dreams (Hawakal, 2025). She has published widely. Her most recent works can be found in Fixator Press, Daily Star, Medusa’s Kitchen and Saraanga.