By Sekhar Banerjee
Juxtaposition
The renovated church near the promenade
has a large bell
in wrong metals – it sounds like a sea-coast cannon
and the new washrooms stand side by side
.
like soldiers, anxious
before returning to the garrison
You spin oddness and similarity like a nervous Tibetan
weaver making religious motifs
on a scarlet silk scarf
or a sleepy tailor stitching consecutive wrong
buttonholes in a formal shirt
We take a side and arrange similarity throughout the series, as if,
every uneven number is our special child
.
There is an ice-cream seller with a pair
of maroon shades in the rain
You can’t decipher his eye movement
.
like dissimilar chairs in a perfect table
You come to understand
juxtaposition is rather a choice than a coincidence
.
The Essayist
Nowadays every organ in my body
is an individual. I walk like the French Revolution
and I see the working of my limbs
like an eighteenth-century staggering power loom
I roam and I count
one by one: this is my hand, this is my head,
this is my perception of my face
And, I know, those are my legs which will not let me fly
and that is my only solace for losing all wars nearby
like an essayist balancing his words
in the second draft
And I look at my severed legs only in the dark
when the last pomelo flowers of spring
start blooming on them,
as though, they are my French floral brocade shoes
and I float
with my bereaved knees
like a renaissance painting – white and blue
.
Sekhar Banerjee is a bilingual writer. He has four collections of poems and a monograph on an Indo-Nepal border tribe to his credit. He lives in Kolkata, India.
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