The Sorceress 2

By Sreedhar Mukhopadhyay


At the dead of the night, just when I
rouse from my shaken sleep;
with a sleeping baby in your arms,
in a highway motel at Malda.
Yours trying to be struck with sensitivity
over a cup of mildly raw tea.

Your golden-bordered maroon saree
which used to float in my dream
catches the colour play
--dark black slowly merges into the lemon-yellow.

The fire-drops of my too passionate desire
in my dark room melts the silver hands
of the ancestral clock;
and right then, your bus starts.

The more Kolkata is left behind with its
aromatic flavor, the more you are up to the snowy touch.

Oh! My dear Sorceress,
before cursing me, think at least for once,
how many times the combined stupor of you two
wrecked my broken ship.
Think how many times my grandpa returned
though hay way down, only to buy
a diamond rose pin for my beloved.

And me too, how many times have arrived
at the heart of black fire, in the venture of
collecting the seminal fluid of your fresh flower
in a trance.

I have been transfigured into the symbol of the
silence of those many lamps that floated down
the stream by people wishing long life for their loved ones.
In your journey you grow gradually distant
and fix me in the complex geometry of the galaxy
with a cerebral bonfire in me.
I know nothing right, but I’m sure to
trespass within you in the next morrow surely
and be as inseparable as the
feathers on the body of a duck.