Subhadip Majumdar - Writing For Peace

We, beneath the Kanchanjungha :

I have come to believe that not only the sea but the mountains are also within me

Every beauty of the earth is within me

I once said it to you, the beauty that I came across on the crossroads

And you laughed like a woman should laugh, with silence embraced with grace

The strange thing is the white mist never grasped you, even when everything is gone, I can see your trembling eyelids

Your cold skin and my warm hand on your face

Your hair flows as a natural spring that comes down from a forgotten point of the Himalayas

You smell of the mountains, the green hills, the bells of a monastery, and your eyes bear the sacred hymns of Tibetan language, never to be said but uttered with no sound, traveling to

Your own unknown deep soul

Will I ever reach you there?

You never cared for me to answer

Because by then the dazzling cafe lights were showered on you

The colorful flags on the mountains were flying high

The clock tower sounded seven times in the evening

You came a bit close to me, smelling now of the fresh earth which brings the rain

I tell you many things, a thousand useless things of a young man, his single room, sleepless nights, unstable job forever

And on nights when the blue moon was outside his window he wrote, forgetting all that pained him and brought nightmares

Do you still remember the first poetry I read you?

One dawn when there was no one on the road but an old man carrying a load of boxes on his bent shoulders, his face covered with wrinkles

Behind him was a boy who carried buckets of water

For those poor women of the hills who can never bathe due to shortage of water

They bathed on the road with their clothes on, wetting their hair and paying a high price for water

The boy would show the women the mirror in which they combed their hair

Are these the women Kipling ever spoke about?

I saw your face full of pain at that moment and you looked at me and came across me straight

And said me, “Not me, write about them”

And you kissed me

You walked down

And I could see in your hands you had gently folded my poem in a white sheet and kept it neatly in your bag

You turned at the point where you would be lost

Your eyes shining in the first sun

I followed you,

I saw Kanchanjungha glittering white with its head high, very high in the blue sky

We both stood there meaningless but happy.

_______

Note = “Kangchenjunga, also spelled Kanchenjunga, is the third highest mountain in the world.”
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangchenjunga ]

Calcutta, I owe you :

Perhaps we are destined to live a life of love and melancholy

The days and nights with you each time broke me cut me sliced me created me formed me

My utterings in a wrong time in a wrong mirror in a wrong road

But you understood it all

The women that danced before me

The buses that went halfway and stopped

The winds that roamed like an insane traveler at night

The old buildings, the known streets the wrecked alleys, the Bengali words in streets that always changed color but the fragrance remained the same

The horizon painted with flying birds

From sunrise to sunset I love the city

We have forgotten each other completely

We have forgotten nothing

We are in each other like a shadow in a body

I whisper you my dreams in my secret silence that only you can create

We met we sang we live in strings of joy and sadness

Calcutta I owe you my all those thousand births

Each uncaptured dance on the rope of time before the actual Spring comes!

Subhadip Majumdar is a writer and poet from India. He is certified in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa. He was also a long-time editor for a reputed Bengali poetry journal. Subhadip has also written a short novel as Tumbleweed writer in Shakespeare and Company in Paris, France. Two poetry books have been published and one novel is in the process of publication. Books published on Van Gogh from New York and A Short Collection of Stories available on Amazon.

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