A wistful love poem as part of a poetic response to the prompt ‘A Place in My Body’ given in The Significant League literary group for the #NationalPoetryMonth in April.
The brazen touch of yours, spreading like a flame
In my silken soft core, fills me with rhythm, then eludes me.
With my fertile rain, you wash your sky yet again
A place in my body, savaged by desire, seeds germinate
Rhythmic pulses of love leave us quarantined.
A place in my body, like the cloud and smog
Of poetry in the making, conjoins with a place in your body.
Together, the torment enters through the portals of our skins,
Stretching over the fabric of our beings.
Haikus and vignettes open their blossoms, whirling in our universe.
In our universe, you spread your hands like open sidewalks
And I unlock the gate of my perennial cage. A place in my body
The fluttering’s of the dainty wings of breathless birds
Learning the art of floating between familiar pleasures and maladies.
The wet longing, nestled between their creases, nurses me.
I know, I know the crumbling places in my body, the cracks
Through which you slipped, usurping my fingers with your fist.
You return to my body with your migrant airs, I calm down, dense, lovelorn.
Lopamudra Banerjee is an acclaimed author, poet, translator, editor with nine solo books and six anthologies in fiction, nonfiction and poetry. She has received the Journey Awards (First Place category winner) for her memoir Thwarted Escape: An Immigrant’s Wayward Journey, the International Reuel Prize for Translation (2016) and also International Reuel Prize for Poetry (2017) and other honors. Her poetry has been published in renowned platforms including Life in Quarantine, the Digital Humanities Archive of Stanford University. Her collaborative poetry collection with Priscilla Rice titled We Are What We Are (Black Eagle Books, 2022) has been 1st Prize Winner at New York Book Festival 2024 and her translation of a famous Bengali historical/biographical novel titled The Bard and His Sister-in-Law (Black Eagle Books, 2023) has received Honorary Mention at Paris Book Festival and Hollywood Book Festival 2024. Recently, her debut Bengali collection of poetry Draupadi Theke Nijoswi—Amra has been launched in Kolkata and also in the Dallas Public Library, Texas, with a performance of a psychological drama ‘Mukhomukhi’, in which she has made her foray as a playwright.
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