Three Poems — On Autism, Memories and Spring

World Autism Day: In the voice of God’s own child

The poetry of my birth rushes past, in spurts

Celebrating the blue of my being,
My birth, the witness of a silent symphony
The marriage of a different, fecund earth
With the fire and whirlwind of an unruly dream,
Born and burnt away.

The blue of my being drizzles down.
Smoldering fumes, muttering half-baked words.
Burn your trash, awaken, reawaken, bury your rotten lies.

Cloudbursts of stifled, splintered voices, in jihaad, pours in.
The poetry of my birth rushes past, in spurts
Through the grinding labyrinths of human sameness.
They strangle, shoot singing birds, they stifle hearts
They annihilate history of the persecuted, they mow me down.

Unnamed, unheeded, dismembered, the waves of the blue
Rush past the letters, alphabets, numbers, algorithms
Of self-proclaimed ‘normalcy’, dying to hug the shores.
Celebrating the blue of my being, my dirges emerge
From thousand mangled nights, waiting for a wondrous dawn.

Celebrating the blue of my being
As it drizzles down, drenching the cacophony of human sameness.
Burn your trash, awaken, reawaken, bury your rotten lies.

What’s Cooking: Kitchen Memories in a Faraway Land

A mosaic of love
Inscribed in the
Garrulous kitchen.
The frothy waves
Of intimate memories
Bubbling over
The shores of a kitchen
In a faraway land
Tolerant to assimilation,
Ethnic assertion.

What’s cooking?
Immigrant resuscitation
Of food tales.
Fists clenching, unclenching
A new spousal aroma, awakening,
Clinging to the hands
And dainty fingers
Giving company
To dead chicken and
Deveined, dead shrimp,
Marinating
Making love with
Ubiquitous kitchen spices
Prying on skillets and pans
Throbbing
with inflamed desires.

The smells
and young, lusty pungency
Of kitchen spices

What’s cooking?
A riotous blend of
The smells
and young, lusty pungency
Of kitchen spices.
The sprinkling of turmeric
The sacrosanct marriage
Of salt, sugar,
Winding through
the coarse passages of
Hand-ground cinnamon,
Cloves, cardamom, cumin.
The spatulas navigate briskly
Through the valleys
Of fried onions, garlic cloves
and a recipe in gestation,
The old heartlands of lucid memories
The private, anonymous romance
Of the self-same, immigrant spices.

Spring Song: The Urban Requiem 

[A sonnet written during the start of spring in Texas, USA, on May 1, for the spring poetry reading event at Mockingbird Poetry Society, Dallas.]

In the spring of my love, the pigeons on the ledge
My evening songs swell in rawness of the season.
In a city of loveless urbans, they mumble, incoherent, on the edge,
I smell of juvenile thirst, the remnants of a forgotten treason.

In the spring of my love, your love-words flinging from the doorways
My wings, torn, trampled petals, fly around.
The memories of your touch fill up my lovelorn days,
In cacophonous circles, they wax and wane in orphaned sounds.

My wreaths burnt long time back, bonfires died in lush spring rain
And now, my love, in the brooding birdsong
At the end of my tether, my innards sting in pain,
In wild despair, long tamed, the heart beckons the summers, lingering, long.

In a city of whimpering birds, of closed window panes
In the spring of my love, my swan songs wander in the deserted lanes.

More to read

Autism Awareness Poems Special Edition

Kerala: A Series of Vignettes

To Spring…

About the Author

Lopamudra Banerjee ( 70 Posts)

Lopamudra (Lopa) Banerjee is an author, editor, poet and writing instructor staying in Dallas, Texas with her family, but originally from Kolkata, India. She has a Masters in English with thesis in Creative Nonfiction from University of Nebraska and also Masters in English from University of Calcutta, India. Apart from writing and editing some critically acclaimed books and being awarded with the Reuel International Prize for Poetry (2017) and for Translation (2016), she has dabbled in all genres of writing, from journalism and content writing to academic essays and fiction/poetry. She has been interviewed in various e-zines, literary blogs and also at TV (Kolkata) and at radio stations in Dallas, Texas. Very recently, she has been part of the upcoming short film 'Kolkata Cocktail', a docu-feature based on poetry, but her love for writing feature stories go back to her journalism days when she interviewed people from all walks of life and wrote essays and articles based on them. She loves performing poetry as spoken words art and has performed in various forums in India and USA.
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