An Indian Autumn
By Anubrato Ghatak
India
Today I am the Manganiar’s
Frenzied revolving dance;
In anguished whirls I’ll wash away
The loss of a thousand sons,
As did an ancient grieving god,
With the body of his loved one,
In his fervent dance of death
The heavens overturn.
Today I am a pariah girl’s
Plaintive fleeting smile,
The pain of twenty thousand years
I’ve forgotten for a while;
I am today a charred hand
Through the bars of a garden rail,
Begging for alms on hallowed ground
Where the Buddha found his way.
Today I am sacred thread
On the skin of a Brahmin boy,
Who perhaps will one day ask
What his forefathers destroyed.
I am today the sombre voice
Of a blind decrepit man,
Who sings his love to god above
In the midst of a blinder clan.
Today I am smoke, hanging low
O’er the Ganga and on your tongue,
In me is a chariot that carries souls
While bodies in black pyres burn.
I am perdition, the end of time:
My Forests of Bliss long gone,
My oceans three will plastic bleed
As I choke the birds and block the sun.
Today I embrace,
Tomorrow renounce
Today I fall prey
And the next day pounce
I am to my people
What the world is to me -
Everything and nothing at all -
Faith and heresy.
At the Golden Fort
You are a place.
A quaint dark place of yore;
Of cold stone, and magic now lost.
I am scared of you -
But I want to confront you -
To explore.
You are a portal:
Of confusing dimensions
And skewed planes,
Where the precision
Of the math I was taught
Fails forevermore.
You are a veil of unkempt hair,
That hides something
That I’ll never know;
You are intrigue,
That I would rather preserve carefully,
Lest I drift too far off-shore.
Sanctum
I smell her everyday -
Every time the fumes rise,
And another god remains deaf to his worshipper’s cries;
I smell her in temples,
When milk flows hopelessly across vessels
Of sombre stone and metal grim;
I feel the touch of her wrinkled skin,
Still hear from her lips an assuring hum -
Uma — grandmother, best friend -
My inner sanctum.
A Writing Meditation with Jan
1
Sense with your skin
And taste with your ears”, she says;
“Hear through your nose
And with your tongue gaze!”
And I did…
I took it all in…
Transmogrified to verse all that I’d seen
For the last two weeks,
Travelling with a myriad bunch of black sheep,
Experiencing the land where I’ve always been,
In ways unknown to me.
But when she said,
“Now let yourself feel!”
That’s when it really struck me:
Like how an acid-dipped joint
That has been lying around in
A damp drawer for sometime
Suddenly hits…
Have I so far been
A mere observer, an outsider,
An admirer even, of misery?
Now I’m forced to take a step into the tar pit -
Into the thick of things,
A step closer to being part of it.
2
I wanted to listen
And I forgot to speak
I wanted to sit back
And I realised there are no seats
There is only the next morning
There is only the next meal
Only the next puja
For the mouse on a wheel.
© Anubrato Ghatak 2023.
Anubrato is a classically trained musician and music teacher based in Kolkata, India. He is also part of the popular rock band Anarkyst. Anub was musician in residence on our Story Hunters tour of India in Nov 2023 and will feature in upcoming Blue Swan Events in India in 2024/25. He is also an accomplished poet.
www.writersjourney.com.au @_writersjourney
Photos, except where indicated, by Jan Cornall.
