Tag Archives: memories and pain

When Memories Rain

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I don’t know when the rains started to bleed.

A taste of salty pining, a dash of

Peppered moments and memories, dancing together

Their bodies, clasped, loosening, melting, blurring.

I don’t know when my clay hands composed you,

Mold after mold, structure, shape, dimension

Nestled in the embrace of these coiled fingers,

Your cinnamon breath, blowing its fragments,

Mingling with my own, tearing me open,

The gash of my wounds, alive, and trembling still.

I don’t know when the smell of long lost love

Stark dead, ghost-white, wafts along

The interstate where the night reveals

And sea winds soar and sing, the smell

Of burnt lips entwined, slicing through

The raging night, earnest, shadowy, whispering.

I don’t know when the downpour stopped,

The blood, the tears, the salt tickling me,

Pulling me within, deeper still,

My crust and core, rising, floating

In the debris of the days, lost.

Revisiting An Old Home

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The streetlights flicker,
I am caught unawares
in the fleshy orange call
of the tattered, brown dirt road.
My skin is sliced into nimble pieces,
The black tires of my homecoming
Screech, strangling the road
Like rotten banana skin.

One blink, the smell of dust
And the aroma of wet hair
And coconut oil, two blinks,
Then three, and four,
A waking up, the sharp,
shooting tremors and
The boiling, bubbling up.
The wide, gaping mouth,
The rolling waves, childlike
The froth and the fancy
of remembering my body, growing,
resting my back against
Those damp, breathing walls.

I speak a crisp, powdered language
My hunger for touch, for a caress
Burns into the skin like
A forgotten incense.
The waiting mouth of the old home
sprinkled with the remnants
of used up turmeric, cumin,
the rough hairs of
an unruly childhood
bursts wide open,
I slip down her throat
as she gags, darkened, acidic,
Slowly burning, chipping away.

(All Rights Reserved.April 25, 2015)

Note: A journey and an epiphany…to be continued….

Invoked

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Time had sung its inevitable song, a body

That had once planted a tree of love,

Had burnt to its last finishing embers.

The face, hung in silence, floating around

Unspoken words, etched in the timeless annals of memory.

The face of life, a sudden, elemental burst

A gleam of hope along the rusty corridors of nothingness,

Hungered for the pitter patter raindrops of a moment in time,

In the plastic quiet of the hospital room, death waited,

A silent companion at the next station, while life

Chewed on his final wishes of a succulent meal.

The finishing touches of words, beneath the breathing tube,

The pinching ache of the intravenous, the seeking out

Of lovingly knit faces, the hands gripping unfulfilled promises

A flash of seconds, then hanging loose.

Life had been beckoned in an unknown itinerary.

Twenty-one years since the sun had last gone down,

Memories unfailingly water, nourish the roots, the leaves,

The fruits the tree had borne, while the face

Hangs in the wall, a dusty portrait, in a home full of the living.

 

Copyright: Lopa Banerjee. January 11, 2014

Footnotes: An elegy dedicated to the loving memory of my maternal uncle, Moni Mama (Anupam Bhattacharya) who left us on this fateful day twenty-one years back, only in his early forties, succumbing to cancer. A youthful and intelligent person full of life and a quirky sense of humor, his memories are invoked till today and he will always be the face of life for me, yearning for love and the closeness of family even in the excruciating pain of his last surviving days.