Five Poems: Plans, Return, Places, Crossing the Street and Kamakhya

ABOUT THE POEMS The poems of Amlanjyoti Goswami are suffused with bright detail, and enact persuasive lyric movements and epiphanies. But what is perhaps most striking and memorable about them is their insistent music, which sounds, almost independently of their verbal trajectories, a delicate equipoise between revelation and mystery. As we watch, through the windows they open, the play of the world—“All that going in, coming out/ All that waiting”—we almost forget, like the woman of “Kamakhya”, what we had come to ask.

Plans

Ambling the long way home

Past crooked corners

Wayfarers stop by and look on,

You step further, further away,

Listening to darkness

Speaking to sun

Chanting in eager tongue

Light comes and goes

Before we spell shadows

In dusty broken corners

Walking on, stopping by all odd angles

Where light falls slanted, music calls the lonely

Shapes come together and bend away

There is no one to talk to

And being deaf is a way to find peace

Return

Memory scatters sight, the long glide home

Time remembers the passing feather

Your silence chirping in the sun

The air stirs intoxicated

The wind spoke your coming

Places

Arrivals are lovely

These hugs, so warm

An old man hugs his happiness,

Offers to carry the burden

Departures, so dear

These tears are real, these fears

When will I see you again?

The lonely pillar watches the coming and going

This play,

Human amidst the guns,

All that going in, coming out

All that waiting

Crossing the Street

Actor turns butterfly

in the night’s silence

Crosses crowded street,

bare hands, nimbler feet

Away from the theatre,

He sheds roles, grows more leaves

The day’s grain, conversation in stone,

all cast away,

There are parts we play

The praise and jeer not for us alone

Kamakhya

gods rest in twilight

the artist thirsts for colour of sky

a few still queue inside, waiting

she lets it all stream in,

and forgets what she came to ask