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Writer's pictureA Too Powerful Word

Srinjay Chakravarti


Srinjay Chakravarti is a writer, editor and translator based in Salt Lake City, Calcutta, India. A former journalist with The Financial Times Group, his creative writing, including poetry, short fiction and translations, has appeared in over 150 publications in 30-odd countries.

His first book of poems Occam’s Razor received the Salt Literary Award from John Kinsella in 1995. He has won first prize ($7,500) in the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Poetry Competition 2007–08. Website: www.srinjaychakravarti.com.




BETWEEN WORDS

Between words,

our silences pool

in shallow fragments of sky

under the liquid fingers

of evergreen trees

after the summer serein.

The sky drips endlessly

from the branches,

and the drops fall wordless

from the drenched green voices

of the leaves.

What else is left for ourselves

after the blue rain

of this evening is gone?

Between your words and mine,

our silences pool—

and they are as much mine

as they are yours.





DESERT MIRAGE

Mosques and palaces,

towers, turrets, miradors

etched shimmeringly

in bas-relief.

Sun and air

act as conjurors.

The haze dislimns

date trees and dunes,

the breeze stained

with smoking sand.

There is more to it

than meets the eye:

mirage or oasis,

illusion or thirst.






SNAPSHOT OF THE SILVER RIVER

Moonless landscape,

complementary colours

in photographic negative.

Trees and rocks

blend with still, heavy air,

while the river deepens

the silence as it mints

its coins of tinkling water.

Soaked in starlight

(or silver bromide?)

contours develop

blacks and lustrous greys

on acetate film

in the darkroom

of one a.m.





DREAM PERISCOPE

Submerged

under blue layers of sleep,

you drift, unanchored...

Glowing fish, plankton,

coral reefs,

monsters, wrecked ships

moving with the undertow

of water saturated with moonlight

while far above the waves,

a single eye, unblinking,

whirls with the horizon's arc.

A flash, a signal, or a target glimpsed,

vanished in a moment—

and the ocean’s rippling fabric,

the purple haze of a distant shore,

the sheen of a sleep-darkened sky.


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