Poetry

Incompleteness
CONQUERED
A SAPLING IN RED
Playing amongst pebbles
A Cold Woman

Incompleteness

The Sun and the Moon don’t complete each other

by imprisoning them into lightness dungeons-

Eclipses serve that purpose;

by choking them till the writhe helplessly-

Black clouds serve that purpose

When desolate, solitary in the firmament,

bullies though not conventional complete their

existence.

And they say- “instigations of Satan”

Samik Chakraborty, B.A.(H) English, Semester VI, (Batch 2018-2020)

CONQUERED

Wars no more happen on battlefields or massacre grounds,
but await like a predator on narrow creases of country borders.

When lines blur,
the lands of ‘slumber’ turn to ‘slaughter’,
temporary homes turn to resting grounds,
barren lands are fought over like precious cargo;
a father, a son, a spouse,
die for nothing
while toasts are made in the honour of winning

we don’t have ‘lines of control’
but ‘lines of latent wars’,
waiting to be blurred
in the name of another barren land,
another father lost,
another wrong done
being corrected by more valiant wrongs

Two wrongs can’t make a right,
souls lost won’t reincarnate
on slaying their twice,
wars wooed can’t be shooed
when demise arrives,
so think again before coveting hate
for it brings nothing
but a mounting debt of lives!!

Parinita Malhotra,B.A.(H) English, Semester II, (Batch- 2020-23)

A SAPLING IN RED

This poem was written in the painful memory of

the victims of the terror attacks around the world.

Here, the sapling refers to a young life plucked

away and killed before it is even given a chance

to bloom.

An unusual deluge it was

When a sapling was borne

Not with green tendrils

But roots of red

It occupied the garden

With a dire, doomed presence

Half bent from struggling hands and colored with the

Roots of demented growth

Soiled by a dozen bullets

Encased in the bloodied nursery

It had no two eyes to witness it’s plunder

No visage to be etched upon

Mute targets of horror and Terror it was,

Its birth metaphor impaired.

All that remained was a crippled conscience

The sentience of a sapling in red

It’s umbilical cord separated

Even before it could feel the world, all leafless yet.

What carnage ensued in this garden

And what doom could be forseen by its gardener

His beloved sapling now nothing more

But a spitting image of human trembles and sighs

Struggling hands touched those tendrils, so benign

What fate had his sapling borne?

Stroked by its ultimate punisher

A shadowless sinner

As he uprooted its final cord

Now a stillborn symbol

The sapling renouncing it’s incarnation

Buried in its muddy womb

Mourned by its Gardener

Embodied by the bloody nursery

Now dry and defunct

Anagha Nair, B.A.(H) Political Science, Semester II, (Batch:2020-2023)

Playing amongst pebbles

If you look at my hands
You’ll see criss crossed lines
Mapping out my destiny
In the dust I live,
In the dust I die.
No pen or no sword
I’ve got twenty balloons,
Red roses and jasmine
Scented dreams which I
Must sell before the sunlight
Fades away to oblivion.
I eye the darkened horizon
It’s a sky out of my reach
Where clouds do float but
Dreams lay suspended and then die.
I play with broken strings that tug
The sorrow of my mother’s heart.
I eat the remnants of a broken life
And save some for the near future.
Playing amongst pebbles and dust
I dream of a life, a life, a life.