Two Poems – Madhumati Chowdhury

Spring is Lost

Galaxies spin in her eyes

Streetlights dim down

Headlights scream past

I am still watching you

Weave your way past the

Tram tracks, over the potholes

Below the broken branch

A slight flick of the wrist

To catch astray leaves

Failure—A sad smirk

You see me and tell me how you missed the first spring

You slept through the season

My arms feel like weeds

Greedy for your being, your form

Reinventing my spine with your skin

Too close. Formidable.

I haven’t thought this through I realised

I keep missing trying to wake you up for springs

Until you drifted into another wasteland

And you never missed a thing.

Better Brown

“did i tell you

i have brown eyes

to see

the world

…in, as, a

little more

than

black and white…”—A friend

To watch the world revolve in sepia-ed tones

have my own box of remembrance stored on a window sill

like a house plant, capturing things in pots you’re supposed to let grow

i’ll let my eyes move over things,

halting, caressing and closing them

enlarging, narrowing and blinking twice for disbelief,

and sometimes I’ll stare at nothing in particular

but draw from my box and remember

a brown sky

a lengthy sigh

with a winter that got caught in my eyelashes.

Illustration : Suman Mukherjee 

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