By Sekhar Banerjee
It is always easy to use Google maps
when you love to guess
a place but do not wish to reach,
as if, it is an old mulberry bench
in a bottomless sleep
.
However, you will not possibly find
this place
where I am sitting now in the middle
of autumn’s heavy late-afternoon traffic – an urgent
meeting of brown dry leaves
and some broken yellow sunlight
.
Here I am going to leave
all old latitudes and longitudes
neatly creased
and folded like a new tourist map
near the empty tea cup; in them, you may find
shadows of fish, bougainvillea seeds,
bees in November, dry deciduous leaves
and ample ember
.
But coordinates are much like our obsessions– hard to go;
they will follow
you through the busy streets in the evening
behind every pedestrian with algae masks
like numerous notifications
for one lost search
.
Sekhar Banerjee is an author. He has four collections of poems and a monograph on an Indo-Nepal border tribe to his credit. He is a former Secretary of Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi and Member-Secretary of Paschimbanga Kabita Akademi under the Government of West Bengal. He lives in Kolkata, India.
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