Subhankar Dutta
Academician / Creative Writer / Theatre Artist
Poems
Poetry makes nothing happen!
I am Never at Home
Published in the Special Collection Creativity in the Time of the Pandemic 2020, Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities
I’m never at Home!
My steps roamed around from Kashmir to Kanyakumari,
But they never met each other.
The smile, the face, the fence, the gate,
The sorry in the damasked eye,
Kisses the horizon too early.
My TV remote shuddered
like a bullet gun
Thrushes the window fence and
I never came back.
Yes, they make promises of a promised land.
Yes, they promise an easy walk!
Yes, they promise a better life,
Yes, they promise like the birthmark!
Been there for years!
I beg, I cry, I try at each opened door,
For home, for domesticity, for belongingness!
But they pass an alien eye,
With half baked smile!
I roar, I fight, I protest at every street corner,
For shelter, for shade, for suggestions!
They cut my tongue,
calling it too long to speak!
Now standing on the empty street
I look up, look down, and look left and right!
I look for faces where I belong,
I look for faces where I reside,
I look for places to rest!
I look for hope and to decide!
Yes, they promised a lot!
As if promises are hardly been kept!
Now, as the street are emptied of hope,
As the faces are getting blank,
As the tongue ceases to speak,
And the path ceases to end,
I will find my home at every coming bend!
My home will be on each unknown land!
I will find my home at every coming bend!
​​The Old Clock
Published in the Special Collection Creativity in the Time of the Pandemic 2020, Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities
The old clock tinkled like
the evening dusk,
Half dark, half lightened,
but still going.
It has witnessed the long past,
The Plague, the drought, the reddened sky,
The sobbing nights and drenching eyes!
The tick tick tick at the deep dark night,
The housewife’s many unsaid plights!
The father who ceases to be broken,
Holding the last hope of the night,
the last token!
It has heard the unfed belly crying aloud,
The uncertainty of dawn looming around!
It has witnessed the second-last,
It has witnessed a long past.
To My Freud
Published in the Journal LangLit
The paths were hazy...
The zigzag jugglery of words,
The emerald colour that glittered
on the narrow space of her finger,
The confused air ceased to flow
between her lips,
The fight that fought silently in between, All, all embarked,
a ‘Freud to my Freud’.
There was a dream in the Westwind that cried.
There was hope –
to be there or not to be.
There was an autumn to redeem.
There was a dream without a dream.
There was a road that must have been taken.
There was a wing that hadn’t been broken.
There was a lie that lay within.
There was a sigh that cried within.
A charoite to my Freud.
The lonely paths where the birds chirp,
The horizons where the sun kisses the soul,
The meadowy race where the roe roams,
The light that never ceases to enlighten.
Yes, the paths are hazy.
My moon embraces the new Sunbeams!
Now, I leave my Freud in my dreams.
In My Own Eyes
Published in the International Journal of Creative Literature for Peace and Humanity (IJCLPH)
The exotic eyes exoticized
whatever they encountered!
The narrow lanes, the muddy roads,
the uncharted paths
All seemed like an eastern sun
yet unknown to itself!
The insight under the Kajol-ed eye,
The white, red bangles
like a mourning cacophony,
The country songs,
the weather reporting farmers,
The unsaid but well-expressed rituals,
And all the pages of the book
Yellowed with dust but still withering the heart!
I struggle with my new pen to ink myself!
The bruised past,
the embodied history,
The scars engraved so strongly on those yellow pages,
It haunts my morning thoughts!
I look for a blank page
to write my history but find none!
I asked each page, 'Am I here?
Am I there?
Am I anywhere?
They smiled back at me like never before.
As time ceases to care,
As the pages cease to bear,
As history fails to write,
I rise every morning, and I fight.
I fight with the conclusion each day,
I add a new page and mould new clay,
I open a new chapter- Decolonial Rise,
I write myself again, in my own eyes.
In My Inbox
Published in the Institute Magazine of Midnapore College PRANGON 2016
How many pearls have to be taken
To make you so bright?
Fades the Darkness with
Your charming delight.
The world is beautiful
As you are here.
Oh, Friend! Don't go,
Do come near.
Wish you live to the water's end,
Be you immortal,
My beloved friend.
Now the tree leaves are deep green,
Showing you- free from din!
In the darkness of my life,
You are the brightest, happiest light.
Be it day or night dark,
You are Skylark, My sweet lark!
You are, to me, 'Divine type'
You are the 'Rainbow' of my life.
My window speaks a lot
Published in The Great Indian Anthology, Vol-1, by HBB
The dangling curtain,
the spider-waved roof,
The sparrow’s sprawling,
the distance loop,
The curve that she made on my paper,
The crack of mind that was seen later,
All, all came with the Arabian wind
And drenching my east with a lullaby.
A sleep of long seventy years.
They know not,
They know not the blood, word spitted out.
They know not the bodies uncounted out.
They know not the cry that smiled alone,
They know not the unheard bullet’s tone.
Yes, my window knows a lot.
The dripping rain on the window fence,
And my thought in the glass getting dense.
Emotion’s Efficacy
Published in the Institute Magazine of Midnapore College PRANGON 2016
The sweet hours of those past days,
The dreamy night with an authentic day,
The deep desire and that happy strain,
All the happiness with its concealed pain,
All the moments of classic beauty,
All your pleasure and my ‘sad satiety’,
The stand-still time in your hand,
The promise and that protective band,
The perfect-sorrow that we shared,
The little pleasure we cared
Are no more with me.
The daily drudgery and the lonely path,
The soul’s sufferings with sorrow’s bath,
The reluctant life without passion,
The spending-days in a false notion,
The ever-giddy desire for a new life,
The happy one, in a new type,
My haunting days and fearful nights
Are all with me, my daily fight.
