By Nishi Pulugurtha
Witness to times past
A garden tracing its time back
Centuries,
The river flowing by
As it had always done
They have been there together
For years now
Bound by geography, by place
Witness to all that has changed
Witness to all that is changing now
Huge trees, overarching branching
Creepers, shrubs, foliage
Dry leaves – red and brown
Rustling, now quiet
The wind blowing through the green ones
Leaning on, some bent
Broken too,
Twisted and curled
Cut down, decayed
Banks derelict too
The river’s course has changed
Mud flats with debris
Muddied waters.
Glistening in the winter sun
On the broken bench a lone figure
Asleep in the winter sun
Some rest amid all the noise and bother
Before life resumes all over.
Yellow Bird
That yellow bird with a black band around its neck
Perched itself each year
December/January
Its winter haunt, I guess
It sits for a while perched on the branch
And flies off
To land on another branch
The little leaves barely a camouflage
Solitary on its perch
Chirping for a while
To soar away
It is back soon
Almost each morning
The pleasant winter sun seems to be just right for it
It feels nice
It makes me feel nice
The colour, the motion
The flight.
That happy yellow bird
With the black band around its neck.
Dr. Nishi Pulugurtha is Associate Professor in the department of English, Brahmananda Keshab Chandra College and has taught postgraduate courses at West Bengal State University, Rabindra Bharati University and the University of Calcutta. She is the Secretary of the Intercultural Poetry and Performance Library, Kolkata (IPPL). Her research areas are British Romantic literature, Postcolonial literature, Indian writing in English, literature of the diaspora, film and Shakespeare adaptation in film and has presented papers at national and international conferences in India and abroad and published in refereed international and national journals. She writes on travel, film, short stories, poetry and on Alzheimer’s Disease. Her work has been published in The Statesman, Kolkata, in Prosopisia, in the anthology Tranquil Muse and online – Kitaab, Café Dissensus, Coldnoon, Queen Mob’s Tea House, The World Literature Blog and Setu. She guest edited the June 2018 Issue of Café Dissensus on Travel. She has a monograph on Derozio (2010) and a collection of essays on travel, Out in the Open (2019). She is now working on her first volume of poems and is editing a collection of essays on travel.
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