Three poems trace a nomadic soul moving from neon-lit indulgence to ancient, sacred landscapes, seeking awakening, desire, and meaning amid transience, spectacle, and elemental stillness.
Holiday lights in Dallas
In the palette of the night sky
The unabashed colors of the night
Awaken, from the dense, dark womb of the earth
Or, is it all an optical illusion carved in the image
of the union between the earth and the night sky?
The sky is all but a mashed-up synergy of high-rises
And the pale blue and pink fountain dance
All concocted, programmed, to consume
the grooving rhythm of the night.
It’s Christmas, and our guilty pleasures catching up,
creeping towards the new year—
Another new awakening, darling,
Where you and me, with our not-so-new, weather-torn bodies,
are still groping for novelties
Amid the silhouetted darkness, the flirtatious, shimmering slivers
of splendor in the fluorescent, transient glory of the night.
[Musings of the nomad poet amid the holiday festivities, Christmas, December 2025]
Sedona
Sedona: Musings
(I)
Nomad words
Churning in the air
Chipped off, peeling
like chunks of
forlorn, old rocks,
An architectural haven construed
By divine forces.
Wordless glances
Nestled in between artistry
And wild abandon
Fumes of human wants
And flames of centuries
Doused by the wet, porous earth.
Fragrances and fluorescence
Housed within rocks and ravages,
Monologues, soliloquies of the fecund soil
Germinating from the womb
Of the sandstones
And then, out of nowhere
Melting, evaporating
Into the vortex of infinitude.
Sedona
(II)
Gorging on
The incandescent hues
Of art reclaimed in stones, and structures sculpted.
Wisps of furtive air
Hanging loose between slivers
Of the red earth, wobbling like an enchanting tune, composed anew.
Tiptoeing, feather-light
Amid the body of the trails,
The Buddha consciousness emerges, like flickering atoms of light.
Pulsating rhythms rippling
In the cyclical rituals of the chakras, traversing
In the sacred echoing of birth, rebirth, salvation, mysticism decoded.
[Poetic musings, inspired by the poet’s recent visit to Sedona, the Vortex capital of USA.]
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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