In an attic where clocks play whist with time,
And fissures precipitate in gossips’ brittle rhyme
He draws little coasts in graphite,
Annotating his hiraeth without spite.
He reads patiently the gazes like a folded map,
Charts lacustrine sorrows and their colonial scars
Hunts crocodile tracks in memory’s soft lap,
Or corks old poisons in his ink’s glass jars.
He traces the agonies of those contours,
Or of obscure paragraphs that stall the motion,
Of hounds that a civilization invents in its moors,
That are oblivious to history’s gray erosions.
His habit is no sin nor a simple face,
But merely a sequestered telescope—
He keeps it close—that solitary, redeeming grace,
With wearied nerves that still know how to cope.
Carbon becomes his penance and slow salvations,
As neighbors, once distant, slide steady a hand;
His footnotes and confessions—his tightlipped stations
Until the storms return to the candlestand!
Arup K. Chatterjee 