‘Revisiting An Old Home’ is Lopa Banerjee’s poem dedicated to her maiden home in Barrackpore, India. It is now part of her debut poetry collection ‘Let The Night Sing’, which has been published by Global Fraternity of Poets and has recently received Honorary Mention at the New England Book Festival 2017 in Boston, USA.
Let the Night Sing – Poetic Musings
The streetlights flicker,
I am caught unawares
in the fleshy orange call
of the tattered, brown dirt road.
My skin is sliced into nimble pieces,
The black tires of my homecoming
Screech, strangling the road
Like rotten banana skin.
One blink, the smell of dust
And the aroma of wet hair
And coconut oil, two blinks,
Then three, and four,
A waking up, the sharp,
shooting tremors and
The boiling, bubbling up.
The wide, gaping mouth,
The rolling waves, childlike
The froth and the fancy
of remembering my body, growing,
resting my back against
Those damp, breathing walls.
I speak a crisp, powdered language
My hunger for touch, for a caress
Burns into the skin like
A forgotten incense.
The waiting mouth of the old home
sprinkled with the remnants
of used up turmeric, cumin,
the rough curls of
an unruly childhood
bursts wide open,
I slip down her throat
as she gags, darkened, acidic,
Slowly burning, chipping away.
The Kolkata launch of Let The Night Sing, with Sufia Khatoon, co-founder, Rhythm Divine, Dr. Santosh Bakaya and Dr. Sanjukta Dasgupta
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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