Poems by Oindri Sengupta

Born of rain


On days like these when
the sun is cold and the evening air
freezes the leaves of my window,
I see you sit with a few stars 
around your bookshelf
and use them as page markers of the night.
In between the spaces where 
the hanging threads separate our skies,
you drew ancient figures inside me and
gave them names of thunder.
And when they stormed the stillness of my lips
you erased them all.
Except the one which had the likeness of a tree.
Like a river that lost all its traces,
I crossed them
building bridges over our lands
where the seashells born of rain would pass
from me to you.


Illusion of darkness 


I've reached the bottom of this light
that pierces softly through the breeze that ruffled my hair.
Your touch was delicate and I was half born,
barely knowing how the words would fit
inside the miles I walked with you.
There was a sound of strangeness in the air
and my ears could only reach where 
evening sky split opens a dawn 
like the heart with a thousand cuts on it.
And this is how the year had passed.
I kept burning bridges along my way
while your eyes kept sewing 
the lights that fringed the table,
where you scattered coffee beans for next day.
It's only in the reluctance of summer,
I've found the answer of silence. 

 
Little Mornings


No matter how many times I tried to look away,
the ghost of your eyes 
has held me like a prisoner of war.
If you had thought that the only way 
to cross the sea is to fold the clouds 
one by one,
then you've lived only once.
For I had seen how the tossing of its water
had crushed the daylight into 
a hundred molecules of an unbroken song. 
And turned the beating of my heart upside down 
with the slightest utterance of a misspelled rain.
As time is a metaphor of loss,
everything that bears your name 
is only a reflection of those roads which
I still walk through in sleep.


Flower without Shape

All that has been burning inside
becomes a flower without shape.
The footsteps have turned into graves 
and the fall of every second 
sinks like the streaming of fishes 
in a cloudless night.
I've been asked to hold my breath to live. 
I did and I learnt 
how stones carve themselves 
inside a blooming river.
Desolateness has no name.
It only resembles a face that erases itself
every time it tries to erect sands of memories, breaking into multiple pieces of wind.
And when it does,
I sit with one half of the sky in my hands
while peeling off the residues of your breath 
from the folders of my skin.

Poet’s bio:

Oindri Sengupta teaches English at a Government School in Kolkata. Her poems have appeared in The Lake, Poetica Review, Tint Journal, Istanbul Literary Review, Outlook India, International Women’s Writing Guild, Abridged, Dhaka Tribune, Parcham Online etc and upcoming in Dreich Magazine. ‘After the Fall of a Cloud’ (Hawakal Publishers, New Delhi, February 2022) is her debut book of poetry.