Two Poems Of Sreedhar Mukhopadhyay

The Vegetable Lady


Vegetable Lady, you are all-enduring
It’s breakfast time now.

Your brimming sunlit body is now opening it’s eyes
secret diseases of the stale night will be healed soon.

You are not the damsel who copulates
with the donkey in a wine bottle.
In your expanding protoplasm I sleep, I dream, I wake up.

I do not collect souvenir for you in the Polynesian islands
I do not wait for you in front of the morgue.

You are the first virgin on earth without a tinge of sex and love.
To observe your quantum love-making with the sky
I lie awake for many a night.

“That moves. That does not move.
That is far off. That is very near.
That is inside all.
And that is outside all.”

Vegetable Lady
You will soak in rain all through the night.


The Night


Night, please do not leave us.

The yellow eggs will be hatched in sunlight
producing millions of immortal scorpions.
The young warrior who went to collect sacred weapon
from the Fire-River in the nether-world has not yet returned, yet.

Scientists are killing themselves.
There’s no energy left inside the womb of the earth for defense.
The magic power of incantations is vanishing fast.

The sick danger is vomiting, touching her face to the basin.
Soon she will be back on stage
covering up the tropical wounds on her breasts
under heavy cosmetics
she will dance to prolong the night.
Lascivious sixteen hundred girls are engaged to mislead the sun.

In the yellow egg the scorpions wake up from sleep.
We realize how fast the time is withering away.
Atom bombs are collapsing like flat balloons.
In no time our genitals are being transformed into incomplete flowers.

Blood is oozing out of the moon.

Oh Night! Become a mighty dictator, now.

Sreedhar Mukhopadhyay : Poet, Short story writer.Has seven books of poems and two books of short stories.