When songs are banished to marbled things
Like summers in a sparrow’s twitter
Like a bee and its sting, its songs and its wings—
The indistinct sadness of squirrels’ flitter
The playhouse of these lights on the river
Of stars fluttering on torn dark veils
Of outcaste cobbled streets amid cold fever—
Fireflies on a nocturnal vessel’s sails
Memories clenching a cracked pavement:
Waylaid cinders on a cold iron grate
Rain-slicked stones—therapists for bereavement—
Bamboo reed ripples on a black canal’s strait
All the fissures of wilted trances, faith reforges now
Shards of death as the faint architecture of your brow
Arup K. Chatterjee 