Calcutta, where he was born

Calcutta, where he was born,
remains torn between the
Kabuliwala’s song and the Mukherji’s
forgetfulness.

It vacillates with the strange countenance of
culture, counter-culture, ideas and enigmas,
modernity and the antiquity, and
of things that sometimes are as distant as the aurora
itself.

The sky remains blue, dappled with her
white siblings. By the scent of autumnal hue,
the minds often takes a gladdening pew
of contentment
but fresh excuses crop up- of revolution and
making love, as trees droop their leaves in humid
merriment.

Here, as Mukherji often says,
love you see, can be found in the tree tops and
in grassy parks, in the dark skins of young men,
in the concrete seraphim hanging out with an
invisible friend making the noise of a thousand
civilization. What is that word-cosmopolitan?

 For the mothers in love
feeding an infant dog, for trams that run over poets,
for yellow romantic cabs, for the kid with the dress
dancing in a discotheque, for the drunkard with the
white brainy pill, for I who burn in love, for bearded
patriarchs with impotent minds, for the peasants and the
sufferers, for matchbox like slums, for the careless ones,
for story tellers with the tales of a crazy tiger in the zoo
whose howls of love have turned into a moo, for artists
driven into politics and politics turned into poly-tricks,
 for the partition of an old country, for the drying of blood,
 for the other side of the Padma, from Chittagong to  Darbhanga,
for me, for us, for you, for me, for I, for this,
 she remains.

Love she says, must hang out of
us, and not hang us,

and a young poet dies
in his words.