Drip..
drop..
drip,
The Stone of Time
eroded
by
The
Silence
Tempus
4 Replies
Tag Archives: Reminiscence
Waiting for Brueghel
You yearned to see him,
longed after him as you
did in your Florentine days;
Brueghel,
as advertised
Brueghel as promised;
Amid the pristine marble
of the Royal Fine Arts
(Brussels museum of renown)
Brueghel drew them,
drew you like a moth
to immortal f(l)ame,
you exchanged more than
rubies for a promised look;
Doors wide open
staircases agape,
you hurried on up
when the laconic voice intoned,
“ the 15th,16th,&19th.centuries
will be closed for lunch ”
a momentary disappointment,
your visual caresses postponed;
At one o’clock
your heart beat faster
and faster still at a minute past,
when the doorman capitulated
down the corridors you dashed to
see blank wall after blank wall,
a veritable Tabula Rasa
they forgot to mention
that during lunch
Brueghel had also left the Casa.
Intermezzo
Voices on a phonograph
flutter across a deserted apartment,
their cadences lose themselves
among the zig – zag alleyways
on whose rooves silhouettes are painted
by passing airships on
bright timeless summer days;
In a nearby park
the oompah band plays
snatches of some Strauss melody
enthralling lunchtime crowds
attired in their finest holiday fashions;
And in the apartment
where someone used to be,
only a discarded telegram remains,
and with that emptiness inside me
I get up and leave;
leaving just the mirror
and the silence.
Invoked
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.
Memorial at Ostend
The Seagull swoops theatrically ,
alighting onto the supporting stanchion ;
” Canada Remembers ” is affixed to
that railing where the Seagull now
stares off into the middle distance ,
perhaps at the Ferry from Dover inching
its way toward the harbour ;
calmer waters to-day unlike then ,
when they caused Canada to remember ;
” Banleda ,Bond ,Brown , Brush ,Byrne ,Cathcart ..”
twenty-six in all alphabetically tabulated ,
their five Motor Torpedo Boats numerically so ,
459 ,461 ,462 ,465 ,466 ;
We remember them now
amid all the firestorms that year
lost in the accidental fire and explosions
on Fourteenth February ,Nineteen-Forty Five
here in Ostend harbour ;
back then too a seagull swooped
theatrically alighting on the same stanchion ,
and had stared out to sea unaware
that Canada would be given cause
to remember and remember still .
Love Bug v. Google Glitch
PART- I-Reminiscence
Engulfed with sweet tangerine
tingling thoughts of you,
All trickling down in a trooping
tangential discipline within
The ganglionic ‘garbage’ globes
of the indomitable grey goblet,
Densely, pervasively percolating
as deliquescent dulcet dollops,
Pickled to perfection by generous
acidic gallons of acrid separation,
A sage now of an isolated island,
profound with manifold elucidation,
Crystallized dark with the purified and
the rarified of those rambled ravings!
PART II-Returning Reverie
Still the very synopsis of your retrieval
reverie that I relentlessly relish,
Makes it a rejoicing soul inquiry
of a classical cheery theory no fuzzy!
An evergreen fluorescent pigmentation
in a sudden transformation, all
Mushrooming smileys springing back with
creamy cherubic life lilts from the
Sporulated dormant spell so spastic,
rapidly grasping all the humidified warmth
And moistened affection exuding
by your illusion-automated presence,
Barricades of non communication
boring holes with a strong Marxist plea
Of inseparable unison, all the indiscriminately
inundated erosion gleefully
Building and bridging again by this
forethought happening grippingly!
PART-III – Lyrical Letter
As a prelude to your rousingly awaited arrival,
Now temporally accentuated
In sculpting a variegated verbose verses
Of our intricately indulgent intimacy,
With all with the monstrous killing
Spree of Pattinson’s vampire instinct,
To chivalrously cherish our mellifluous meadows
Shared, all terrifically mind-tattooed,
And no-quixotic knightly rescuing the still sharable
Futuristic, no-fictitious, space from extinct;
Verbose warriors with targeted penetration
Impregnating them forever in your delicately
Seasoned thyme and rosemary heartland,
Propelling your arrival to this longing
Barren fallowed never never land,
Instantly mutating it to stupidly
Cupidity struck Newfoundland,
Abound with asaparagy and gingery
Absorbingly amorous passion land!
PART-IV- Glitches, a Love Reassurance
With heaps of hopes wrapped in all those
Tiny tactile verbal warriors in strong dose,
Imprinted with tonnes of hues and tunes,
Of unsaid yearnings and unheard melodies,
On the frail and lifeless yet cryptic cellulose,
Bearing all reunion remedies
for our desolation maladies,
Invincibly uploading all these
heart musical mélange
Into the electronic page, as soft as
your solange bosom,
The hope laden omen gets
a horrendous twist out of the blues,
Just buzzed the SEND button
to render you my soul stirring craft
Bubbling “Oo”s like scoops of scrap,
flashing wickedly my screen
Barbarously displaying,
”Oops, server error occurred and
Your email not sent “, l
ike a seismographic tremor was
My shaken self, mind of the
doomsday Nostradamus,
Instantly and nonchalantly
recuperating with a magical Messi flick
Only to staggeringly survive
with your rhapsodically revival hopes!
My mind as stern and firm of the Nazi dictator,
Pronouncing with an arrogant grin.,
All the glitches in the Google
Dare not a dampening debacle
Of our eternal clasps and clutches,
as we are a super duper soul couple,
Engraved even in gravest of the graves
As unison beyond all comprehension!