Two Poems
By Meghna Roy
A Long Sentence from Kashmir
As a criss-cross of lights
painfully dissects my room, while
I stay in the city of dreams,
far from my haunted home,
where stains of blood map
the journey of freedom from
one bondage to another,
so that every time
someone asks me if I feel
fortunate or unfortunate to
hail from what is called the
Paradise on Earth, I hold the
framed photograph of me
as a child of eight, standing
between doting parents with
skin whose surface is as
undulating as the landscape in
the backdrop and my pulse
generates shockwaves into that
little paradise of bygone eras –
shockwaves that slowly shatter
the picture-postcard dreams I
nurtured as a child,
reminding me of all those ideas
I could never protect against bullets,
ideas nonetheless that lurk
somewhere behind the mainstream
head of a woman with a nine-to-five
slavery of a job in an alien
city. I smile and say that
Home is no more a noun, but
an adjective that qualifies this
long sentence from Kashmir.
***
The Symmetry of Memories
Like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle,
memories fit into place wherever
I want them to. I take a piece from
around a dusty nook of my clean
bookshelf, another from that long-
forgotten ghazal album that daadu
handed down across generations,
and yet another from that little room
tucked somewhere back in the attic
we left behind while shifting to this
megalopolis, where each person is a
skyscraper dodging its way for some
space guaranteed in the sky. After
I have collected all of them bit by bit,
I carefully screen the ones that fit
into this puzzle. I keep rejecting the
memories of contrived bloodshed,
systematized warfare and planned
mess until the trashcan brims with
what resembles tattered bits of my
homeland. Even Oblivion is
fatigued of my selective Amnesia.
By the time I train my memory
to completely elude me after a
somewhat successful cutting and
stitching of the clock, I finally
create a symmetry of memories
perfectly suited to my happily-ever-
after life in a city of illusions.
Photo-credit: Here
Bio:
Meghna Roy is an undergraduate at the department of Sociology, St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata. She is doing a fellowship at Vh1, India, and working for a start-up called Kolkata Bloggers. Meghna is an elocutionist and blogger (www.roymeghna.wordpress.com). She loves reading existentialist literature.
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One Response to “Two Poems”
Beautifully portrayed…. the power of poetry 😃