November 2021
Bio Note: I am a retired geo-scientist and now engage in full-time writing bilingual (English and Bengali) poetry and do book reviews and translation. Yet my first love is traveling and photography. Being a Tiger fan, I love Jungle Safari too much. I have jointly edited the Indo- American Anthology Bridging Continents. I have a number collections of poems to my credit. My recent collection of poems is Alleys are Filled with Future Alphabets.
Memory Skin
Children moving in circles, in the rain
where wind keens low and all the earth is still,
we feel whispers blowing over our memory skins.
In sleep we speak in different languages
flip the future, forward roll with past stories
the taken, the lost, the certain,
there is no space to breathe, no place to ease out
the cluttered dreams of the past swell around,
scour the banks, tell the newborn to the old river game
tell tides, tell storm winds, tell in hieroglyphs,
Once all alive, now fading and heading towards retreat
the present lights the bonfire of history, makes tea on primuses
asks questions of life, the trickle of attention dips
on our own and others, cuts it up into fine lines
It’s where our incursion begins and ends.
we cannot name them, only dripping inside.
©2021 Gopal Lahiri
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