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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