Poetry

Surian Soosay image

By

Tuhin Sengupta

The Retreat

The summer is waiting with the sun hot blade

Tucked gently in the dusty dress.

And spring spies and measures time.

The people caught unaware.

We sit in the stumps of trees…where the corpses lie

And think of the market the state is going to make…

‘We shall be townfolk’, the voice passes from head to head

And cigarette smoke curls…

The massacred trees lie…the ground still soft with blood.

And we look at the screens and comment on the

Pictures of Unseen Syria, with the dirt covered babes

Smeared with blood…

‘Those planes must be thrice bigger than the chopper we saw our minister ride’

Casual remark.

The bare forest, bereft of the shiny leaves, huddles

From our village, like a cornered beast…or a baby girl

Retreating in a lone chamber from a rapist’s gaze

And groping hand.

Night.

And sitting astride on the dead

We murmur…the sky looks fire.

And in the darkest night he is born and

The avenging angel spreads the muffling wings.

Tuhin Sengupta

Tuhin Sengupta is a research scholar at National Institute of Technology, Durgapur, west Bengal (India). He is a writer of poems and short stories. Most of his writing takes the nature and people of rural Bengal as inspiration. His research articles are founded on Ecocritical theory. He is also interested in the spiritualism, occultism, and is writing on the presence of the supernatural forces in nature. He is also an amateur herpetologist.