Borrowed Time
Poet: Sunreeta Bhattacharya
Baba is in the neighbourhood, Ammi in her sleep
tells me it’s that time of day
you sit down and you keep
a book of prayers and a tray of leaves
before the wall with a window. A long shadow
will fall behind you from the rising moon,
unless it is one of those pitch-dark evenings.
The choking city is dressed up
like a night queen’s secret,
the hair she’s let down the back of her neck
and her travelling spine, spill it. And
the moon will show up in time on your face,
I have told myself, and this is my time: in the wake
of an approaching darkness and a blind thunderstorm,
in the warmth and the borrowed quietness of this hour,
this moment takes on a mysterious and godly form, and now
I like to play my little game, my fortune
that is my imagination.
History blossoms as poetry
out of a bottle of wars we would sooner forget.
Proceed, says the wildflower, do not pause
to be respectful today:
by the poolside and the marketplace,
armies erase the future of memories,
and the touch of shelter or love is not welcome.
The world I see is empty of everything
that crowds and makes business
of nothing in the middle of nowhere.
Undetailed and still, the sky waits,
serenades and the roof of your mouth and the floor of the sky
sit idle. I imagine nothing. Until—
for little soldiers like me,
every fancy thought that flies is
denied and tied to a tall pole of reality;
there is no poetry I can give you,
nor any poetry you can give me.
I look at the pale and thin clouds, I do
not realise why they graze in an open sky:
no rain, no sorrow, no music
pierces this polythene sky,
but with all that beauty of this butter-cream season
some rhythms and patterns spell out—
what reaches me with the spirit of a solitary poem.
Now slowly,
with the burning and boiling, the spoils and the rampage
in our little hearts see no light,
at least these starved skies tell me so;
our lives short for so much sorrow—
(no, forsake the flutter in your head!
the rioters do not rest, they do not dream, why should you?)
In the middle of our consciousness that flows like a poem,
are you not interrupted, with a feeling that all
time is obese and unrelated to you, that perhaps one should just greet nothing, wait for nothing,—
not the curfew, not Rashid’s call, not the rain?
What is deliverance for me today
will be unbearable in just another day,
what’s swinging must cease to sway and rhyme happily.
The unquiet, hesitant, the nervous and silent us—
we struggle for a page from the library of time, but—
my imagination is a child,
and we cannot imagine much beyond our limitations; but, but, but neither can you, and you won’t let anyone pinch you.
Orange peels sweat, crows drown the azan,
the blood in the sky clots, only a memory of the scar
looks down through a moonbeam
as I feel my face, my face feels my palms
with a returning anxiety, a oneness with the crows and the citrus scent
consumes me; I am quite an hourglass you see—
when I emerge, Baba is back, Ammi still sleeps.
tells me it’s that time of day
you sit down and you keep
a book of prayers and a tray of leaves
before the wall with a window. A long shadow
will fall behind you from the rising moon,
unless it is one of those pitch-dark evenings.
The choking city is dressed up
like a night queen’s secret,
the hair she’s let down the back of her neck
and her travelling spine, spill it. And
the moon will show up in time on your face,
I have told myself, and this is my time: in the wake
of an approaching darkness and a blind thunderstorm,
in the warmth and the borrowed quietness of this hour,
this moment takes on a mysterious and godly form, and now
I like to play my little game, my fortune
that is my imagination.
History blossoms as poetry
out of a bottle of wars we would sooner forget.
Proceed, says the wildflower, do not pause
to be respectful today:
by the poolside and the marketplace,
armies erase the future of memories,
and the touch of shelter or love is not welcome.
The world I see is empty of everything
that crowds and makes business
of nothing in the middle of nowhere.
Undetailed and still, the sky waits,
serenades and the roof of your mouth and the floor of the sky
sit idle. I imagine nothing. Until—
for little soldiers like me,
every fancy thought that flies is
denied and tied to a tall pole of reality;
there is no poetry I can give you,
nor any poetry you can give me.
I look at the pale and thin clouds, I do
not realise why they graze in an open sky:
no rain, no sorrow, no music
pierces this polythene sky,
but with all that beauty of this butter-cream season
some rhythms and patterns spell out—
what reaches me with the spirit of a solitary poem.
Now slowly,
with the burning and boiling, the spoils and the rampage
in our little hearts see no light,
at least these starved skies tell me so;
our lives short for so much sorrow—
(no, forsake the flutter in your head!
the rioters do not rest, they do not dream, why should you?)
In the middle of our consciousness that flows like a poem,
are you not interrupted, with a feeling that all
time is obese and unrelated to you, that perhaps one should just greet nothing, wait for nothing,—
not the curfew, not Rashid’s call, not the rain?
What is deliverance for me today
will be unbearable in just another day,
what’s swinging must cease to sway and rhyme happily.
The unquiet, hesitant, the nervous and silent us—
we struggle for a page from the library of time, but—
my imagination is a child,
and we cannot imagine much beyond our limitations; but, but, but neither can you, and you won’t let anyone pinch you.
Orange peels sweat, crows drown the azan,
the blood in the sky clots, only a memory of the scar
looks down through a moonbeam
as I feel my face, my face feels my palms
with a returning anxiety, a oneness with the crows and the citrus scent
consumes me; I am quite an hourglass you see—
when I emerge, Baba is back, Ammi still sleeps.