(A poem written on the metallic sculpture, ‘The Goddess of Justice,’ at the O.P. Jindal Global University’s Constitution Museum)
Behold, this frayed cathedral of minuscule cranes!
Her halo is a frowzy sun of sawtooth made,
Her bronze breath is braided in belted chains,
And every tooth appears as remorseless as a blade.
Her face—a philosophic mask—soldered into silence;
Eyes sealed with rivets and ledgers of Socratic light;
Skirt of sprockets and cogs, tailored in a ferric tense;
Each wheel, an ancient witness; each washer, a wintered sight.
Her scales—two lunar cycles—suspended by malleable steel;
Her brass pans blink, poising beats of battered truth;
Her sword—the sacramental anchor of a ship in even keel—
Rusted by rhetoric and rain, yet heedful of the codes of ruth!
Her chains chant—clink, clack—springs sigh a mystical syntax;
Her heart is a cluster of clocks; a carnival of pistons in her palm;
In her pulses, magnets memorize minutes; gravel cradles the cracks,
Of her feet; the ground, a courthouse of pebbles and eerie calm.
She wears a child’s toy gear; discarded bikes and cans;
A brake-disc prayer—with trinkets woven and welded,
Overlooking testimonies rustled out of tarnish and titanium-tan,
She is metal, magisterial, Martian, and mother—melded.
Her verdicts clang in the corridors of common clocks—
Dreaded and sublime brittle ticks, hinged on an oily axis;
With idioms of unbending laws and startling mercies in her gearbox,
Her screws rattle, turn, and rhyme, as justice bares its slow praxis.
Arup K. Chatterjee 