FIVE POEMS BY LOPA BANERJEE INCLUDING A 'SAKHA' ONE.

Lopamudra Banerjee:

Lopa is an author, poet, editor and translator, currently based in Dallas, Texas, but originally from Calcutta, India. Her memoir 'Thwarted Escape: An Immigrant's Wayward Journey' was a First Place Category Winner at the Journey Awards 2015 and also received honorary mention at The Los Angeles Book Festival 2017. Her recent book of poetry and memoir, 'Woman and Her Muse' has also received critical acclaim and been featured in various journals and newspapers including The Sunday Statesman, Kolkata, and is now part of prestigious libraries in India and USA. Her poetry, stories and essays have been published in various literary e-zines, print anthologies and lit journals both in India, UK and USA. She has received the International Reuel prize for poetry (2017) and for translating Tagore's fiction (2016) and is currently a creative writing instructor/faculty in Dallas, USA. 

 Her recent works include ''All That Jazz and Other Tales (upcoming), and also 'Kolkata Cocktail', a poetry film collaboration to be released in December 2019.  This photo is a still from the film.

For Simone De Beauvoir

[A reaction after reading parts of ‘The Second Sex’ by Simone De Beauvoir, French writer, intellectual philosopher, political activist, feminist, and reflecting on them as a woman from the Indian subcontinent.]

The last time I woke up,

I remember, I demanded a third space.

A space that meandered

from the hopscotch square

Of estrogen games, from the erectile brain

of testosterone urges.

A space of my own desperation of belongings

‘The Second Sex’, a requirement of my syllabus,

An elusive continent, a vociferous sea,

A torrid landscape of my own making.

Simone, I hadn’t known your name

The feel of that fiercely unwomanly woman 

When in my girlhood, cascading beauty

Of princesses and heroines spilled

all over our barren courtyard,

from the basket of my grandmother’s tales.

Love was the promise of a sanctioned cacophony

Of children to be birthed, the language of coercion

As kings banished queens for sons not born,

Princes’ lip-locked with princesses,

‘Hail thee, patriarchy!’  

The last time you twisted and turned us

In our dreams and sold us a ticket to witness

The vestiges of war between our own troubled selves,

I remember, we had pushed some boundaries,

But there were some barbed wires

which were better left on their own.

The last time your words entered my realm,

“One is not born, but becomes a woman,”

I remember the dark hunger, the denial,

The act of letting go, the truth of our beings.

Simone, we, the ‘other sex’, reborn, recycled

A zillion times, have been churned, fermented

Reclaiming our spaces in the fickle humanity.

Instruction Manual: How To Be That Badass Poet

How to turn to a badass poet

from a domestic goddess is easy.

Just unlearn your cuteness for the essential dark,

Stay on in the pitch-park galaxy,

marinated in sacrosanct words.

Play on in the tumultuous sea of sounds,

metaphors, diction of old poets

Take a line from here, a whiplash of pain from there,

A jingle, a whisper and a surreptitious peak

from the flammable past.

And then, in your own sticky canvas,

shed them off, along with

Your engaged arms, your heaving breasts,

your womb and birth canal,

Replace them all, the sexist jargons you learnt,

And lucid memories of labor

with your nascent, blood-soaked poetry.

Then, after you knead the dough

Of fickle human stories,

Divide the dough into little sacred mounds of word-flesh,

Born from your ancestral womb

Into the cradle of feminine fantasies.

And then, slowly, crisply deep fry them

with tenderness and affliction,

Fry them some more like children birthed

post the gestation period,

As you try to make a home

out of the vestiges of war within you,

The rubble of the overgrown cities within you,

Born between your immigrant dreams,

your becoming, your unbecoming.

To become a badass poet, to be reborn

A hundred times is as easy as it can get.

Only speak to the unfamiliar earth

with your unbridled wet body every time you see

A smoke of an unborn poem, a triggered survival act.

Only speak to your displaced self in the language

Of desperate desires, your tattered earth and sky.

For a non-lover

[Dedicated to the fiery daughter of Bangladesh, feminist author and poet Taslima Nasrin, inspired by her Bengali poem ‘Ek Opremiker Jonnyo’. A trans-creation.]

You and I will live in the same city,

You will run helter-skelter, spiraling around me

On the pretext of work, to fuel your own wantonness.

Somewhere near, you will chit-chat in your leisure,

Booze, shout, create an uproar, while rejoicing.

Then, the dark night will fall asleep, but you will remain awake.

In the evenings, you might go for dinners

To some Goddamn neighbor’s places, for playing,

Who knows, for even taking off a neighbor woman’s sari?

Who knows, her house might be just a stone’s throw away

From my courtyard!

You will stroll along the same roads as I do, remain within my grasp,

You might even let me know one day, you are staying this close to me,

Everyday. I will shrink, shred my own self into zillion pieces

In the pangs of our separation, yet never welcome you, never ever.

Never will I give you the chance to let me know how busy you have been

These days, that you have no time…I will save myself from

Your loveless apathy. You and I will never meet.

Years will go by, but you and I will never meet.

And then, the nothingness of not meeting you for years

Will let me forget how it had been, the experience of meeting you.

I will forget the color of your shirt, I will forget

How you looked when you smiled, how you dug your nails

When we talked, whether you ever looked into my eyes while speaking

Or somewhere else. I will forget whether you moved

Your feet, stood up from the chair frequently, drank water

Never meeting you for all these years, I will forget how you looked,

Where were the moles in your face, or if they were there, at all.

I will forget how your kisses felt, how it felt when you entangled

My hair, how it felt when your face was buried in my bosom.

Years will go by, but you and I will never meet.

We will breathe in the same city, but our paths will never collide,

Even mistakenly. Both of us will fall sick, but never meet

At the end of our familiar alley, at the petrol pump,

At the fish market, or in a restaurant.

Then, many years later, when an ardent evening

Will rush inside my solitary room with its sudden bursts of light,

When I will stand, forlorn, at the verandah and the wild breeze

Of Vaishakh will blow away my sari, I will talk to the moon

The whole night, filling the sky to the brim.

I will tell you then, silently, what is lost if we never meet?

It was preposterous to think that we would die if

We would never see each other again.

Whosoever said it is true?

I never met you in a thousand years, does that mean

I never lived?

I know now what I would tell you. I have pondered over it.

The truth is, you are just an embodiment of nothingness.

I had only crafted you with my fervent wants,

It was me who had crafted you as my lover,

It is me again who crafts you as a non-lover.

I can even live for a million years without seeing you,

Without touching a non-lover, forever.

My teardrop can usher in like torrential rain,

Wiping away all that had been painted,

Wiping away your name, your existence in one swift motion.

Do not think I am living alone,

Your loveless apparition lives with me, always.

*Vaishakh: The first month of the Bengali calendar. 

The Burning

Sakha mine

I didn’t craft poetry for a fortnight now.

The crescent moon has burnt inside my bosom

Turning into a full moon, an exquisite flame of my self-chosen exile.

The fortnight has meandered from the path of the silken morning

To the surreptitious route of the pitch-dark night,

My body has scalded, bore a few burn marks at the turn of every single dusk,

leading to the dark, exiled night.

The earth has grown a few shades darker,

the morning, sucking it’s deep, black exile full throttle.

I didn’t craft poetry for a fortnight now.

Are you the one who tore open the petals of my nude, feminine verses?

Sakha, are you the secret slayer, the silent demon

Eating away, insect-like, the deep blue pathos 

of the universe of my lyrics, one tiny bite at a time?

Are you the one who made Time your greatest ally,

Gave me the poison ivy with passion brimming

all over your betrayer of a body, mingling with mine?

I didn’t craft poetry for a fortnight now.

Sakha, remember the last night that you made me 

your partner in the luscious bed,

The dark, moonless night had merged with my fearless surrender.

My morsels were all yours, the devil of my forbidden wants 

was born out of your fierce verses.

Today, my poems scald with every stroke of the night

The silent, overgrown city inside me burns in its impossible dreams.

The green of my faith, easily born, is turning into the grey ashes of treachery.

Dreamless, moonless, my Home, my land,

my comfort zones burn, what is done cannot be undone.

I didn’t craft poetry for a fortnight now.

Sakha, your burnt out poetry, your dark undone

Is my home now, where can I flee?

Indianness:  The Metaphor of the Misfit 

My Indianness is the bookmark

of sweaty summer musk,

Tucked within the creases

of a self-same, overused book

In the slice of space where

memories of rickshaw-rides

And an old ghaat lay suspended

in a remembered patch of air.

My Indianness is the honks of buses,

yellow cabs and the odd stir

And jerky moves of local trains

 and subways in a jetlagged return

To another home, responding

to a speck of reason.

The froth of my bangla catch-phrases,

in unwarranted, white-infested places. 

My Indianness is the shameless squirt of inabilities

Which makes me an oddity

in a land where new sojourns

are embarked on, new road turns are made,

with pronounced insolence.

My Indianness is my scorching inferno,

as I shuttle between safe-same chores.

My Indianness is my white wallet

purchased from the dollar store

The chain of it that opens up

to reveal two pockets,

One carrying dollars in five, ten,

the other, rupee notes saved

From auto-rickshaw rides, a fleeting whiff

of homes and hearths, abandoned.

My Indianness is the everyday injury

which I can’t bury always, safely.

The fervent flicker of memories,

the occasional dents in the brain

unfazed by changing colors,

the blinding maze of lanes, by-lanes, highways 

When all around me, the sweet lure of amnesia

wins over others so easily.

My Indianness taunts me

as I dream of houses moved in, in my slumber

Houses with cement stairs

and the sparks of tube-light,

and crickets chirping

Outside large glass windows

covered with white blinds. 

As I hang on a thin rope,

flanked by odorless comforts and dusky sorrows.

I write verses, stories on diaspora,

my Indianness, a nameless brook

That craves to be one with a mighty river,

a vain promise to dilute

Thick foams of whiplashes,

onslaughts, residues of soot.

My Indianness is the perpetual rebellion,

the telltale signs of embracing mess.

Ghaat: River-bank

Rickshaw: A vehicle used in India and some other Asian countries, a light, hooded vehicle resembling a three-wheeled bicycle, sometimes hand-pulled, having a seat for passengers behind the driver.

Bangla: Bengali, the Indic language spoken in Kolkata (India) and other parts of northeastern India and Bangladesh.

  All Rights Reserved. Lopa Banerjee. November 13, 2019  

Await more from Kashiana Singh, Santosh Bakaya, Don Yorty etc