Sekhar Banerjee (India) His poetry collections include The Fern Gatherer's Association (Red River, 2021) and Probably Geranium (Red River, 2024). His works have appeared in various international and national anthologies, journals, and magazines, such as Stand Magazine, Berkeley Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Indian Literature, Arkana, The Lake, The Bitter Oleander, Thimble, Voice & Verse, Words and Worlds Magazine, The Bangalore Review, The Wire, Outlook and elsewhere. His poems have also featured in the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English. He received the Arkana Editor's Choice Award in 2023 from the University of Central Arkansas. He lives in Kolkata, India. 

 

 

 

 

English

 

FOCUS

 

 

 

March, and the frangipani trees

have lost their grip on budgeting.

The road is a white notepad,

a stuck piano reed before a refrain,

a dull day after every departure.

The municipal body calls it

 

Plumeria Walk,

bars all traffic.

There is this ripe silence.

Tiptoeing on dead white frangipani meat

now requires a lot of effort.

 

I think about the centre. An origin.

The dot where all lines

of proportion meet. That’s beauty, Dechen tells me,

her lovely eyes fixed, unblinking.

Her eyes her centre?

I try to find mine –

a place to root, a secret hangout, 

an emblem of my own.

 

Beauty is an obstruction in Plumeria Walk.

The neighbours curse. A ten-minute delay,

an undone bus stop.

Like a bandage on a scar,

it prolongs its ghostly whiteness –

even to the wardrobes heavy with scented

linens, the old forks  

in the kitchens, our talks, rosaries,  

and beautiful underwear. Loss hides

in the cupboard

like a migrant in search of a new home.

 

 

How can I tell her all that?

 

 

 

         WAR AND PEACE

 

A Botticelli painting:

a woman and a small kid, red rouge

 

on their cheeks, tranquil as a summer

afternoon in the lower foothills,

resting

after a lunch of dried peach

and soft cottage cheese.

Other things I have not registered yet.

       ….. rows of monk students

in scarlet Buddhist robes,

a kid yawns from the file. Are they

trainee angels?

Botticelli’s young mother

 

yawns, the kid on her lap yawns…

 

 

Waking up in my bed, I also yawn.

As if mutual yawning

is the only nonviolent act of escorting

a good dream

chased by a brutal night

to a home.