Poetry

By

Ananya Chatterjee

Broken

“May I sleep now?
My words have lost their trails
The wind has abandoned my sails
I am a broken bough …”

Someday you shall find me though
Staring at you from the marble eyes
Of a wooden Pinocchio
Shivers will melt your skin
In the memory of
an ancient sin
You’d whipped your mind to forget-

How you had strangled a poet
And robbed the priceless quote
coughed up by his ruptured throat.

The Ride

For a fleeting moment
my eyes hold your fading stride-
the back of your head
bobbing up and down
amid a home-bound evening tide
of salaried men

And then a streetcar
jingles into my vision
I lose the cue
You’ve vanished
from that avenue
of rickety rickshaw pullers
and fatigued flower sellers

I loosen the strap of my helmet
and inhale the air
where your scent lingers

Decades later
my defunct scooter
will soothe my wrinkled memory
With tales of rushed goodbyes,
dripping urban nights,
and half-dreamed pillion rides.

Ananya Chatterjee

Ananya Chatterjee is a software professional presently working for a multinational software product development company. A gold-medalist in Computer Science from the University of Calcutta, composing verses is her passion. In 2013 she worked with the renowned artist Soumitra Chatterjee on translating some of his Bengali verses into English as part of the coffee table book ‘Forms Within‘. She is currently working on the English translation of the distinguished painter Jogen Chowdhury’s verses. ‘The Poet And His Valentine‘ is her first poetry title.