FIVE POEMS BY AMIT SHANKAR SAHA - PUSHCART POETRY PRIZE NOMINEE SERIES 6

Dr. Amit Shankar Saha is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Seacom Skills University. He is also a widely published short story writer and poet. He has won the Poiesis Award for Excellence in Literature, Wordweavers Prize, and the Nissim International Runner-up Prize for Poetry. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize. He is the co-founder of Rhythm Divine Poets and the Assistant Secretary of Intercultural Poetry and Performance Library. He is the Fiction Editor of Ethos Literary Journal and the Chief Executive Editor of Virasat Art Publications. His two collections of poems are titled "Balconies of Time" and "Fugitive Words".

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1. Exanimation of a Nation

Like a draught

of air being held 

in the geography

of my palm.

I blow on 

the topography

of crisscrossing 

lines of destiny.

Spirals of genes

migrate the borders

into chromozones

of D-N-A-tion.

Sometimes 

what we oversee

is what we 

oversight. 

2. Food

That day in Hyderabad

you were so hungry,

you ate a large meal

of various food.

But it's okay,

I understand

food is nostalgia

and nostalgia food.

And people still kill

for the choice of food

when people still die

for want of food.

3. By Bread Alone

A baker in the bakery

once hid a message

in my packet of brown bread.

At home when I unwrapped

those slices for breakfast,

I found nothing secreted.

I turned over the slices,

their dark brown margins

and their light brown centres.

There was nothing cryptic

inside the leavened spaces,

nothing I could have tasted.

So I ate it uninterpreted - 

I don't like spreading rumours

about our racial biases.

4. Revolution 459

At revolution 459 it stopped.

There was an attempt to restart it

but it will not.

You know when the night clears

light tiptoes into your room

and you find things are there

where you had kept them still.

Nothing has changed

or they've come back

in a full circle.

You so much want

revolution 459 to continue.

You know how the grass grows

tearing through the earth.

There is rage tearing through you

at the paused revolution.

5. Perihelion

A faint noise made by the panel

of a window in the wind.

A noise within

at the sight of the breeze

beyond the pane

rustling the leaves.

At the moment 

of perihelion do I ask

the sun to embrace

this movement?

When something leaves time, 

something is still left in time. 

Dr. Amit Shankar Saha

Assistant Professor (English)
Seacom Skills University
Co-founder, Rhythm Divine Poets
http://rhythmdivinepoets.blogspot.in
Media Chairperson, IPPL
Mobile: 8335824287
Blog: http://amitss6.blogspot.in
Website: http://sites.google.com/site/amitshankarsaha
Author of "Balconies of Time" and "Fugitive Words"