Poem | Amlanjyoti Goswami

 pic courtesy : NDTV

Elegy Written in a City Apartment…

(‘The plowman homeward plods his weary way, 

         And leaves the world to darkness and to me’- Thomas Gray) 

A shroud hangs over us

All day and

Night

 And the next day               and

Night and it

Refuses to move

The poison curls into our hearts

 And lungs

Noiseless

 Invisible

 Wordless

It seeps deep within us

And we do not know how to

 Breathe

But the doors were closed

              Long ago

      Even before

The air turned

Poison

Even before

The eyes burnt sunshine

         I kept half a window

 Open thinking the draught

 Might blow in, a cool spring breeze

That makes one forget the winter

And wakes up sleepy old bones

Tired with all that trouble

No no no

The window only invites

A snake of dust to enter

Stealthy

‘The narrow fellow’ in the air

winds its lithe way

 Sashays down the table

 And settles for good in the near and far corners

And then invites another to move along a fine

Gray line that no one noticed

All calls for help went

Unanswered

We too did not return calls for

‘Something must be done’

Screamed the bellicose television

Long switched off and now just a

Gathering of dust

I show an unusual interest

In numbers

The PPM goes up two hundred points

 When I open the door

For 15

Seconds.

It spikes Sergey Bubka, flips Fosbury

When I near the machine

It tells me I am the polluted one

It will take a long time for the air to heal

Much like ourselves, the edifices we build

With bare hands and stone hearts

And the love that pours out of our

Hearts, brains, lungs, tiny fingers…

They take a long time to grow…

Finally, we hope, on the seventh day,

That dust will rest.

The air will return to where it came from

Who knows where that is?

If we were a common

Planet human

The air too

clings to our

souls

And shows us

Who we are.