Pale Musings Poem by Boudhayan Mukherjee

There are some people you love and many you

don't even notice as they pass by seeking solace.

A person does not belong to a place
until a close kin is dead and underground;
he is always adrift through an unexplored region
of your memory. A web of pretext, evasions like a gnat
evading a storm, the thick sunlight too
cannot prevent his omnipresence, the soft footfalls of my sire.
The sea too has its magical corals deep inside
as I have my intestine, liver, appendix, atmam.
I have also in my grip a village lost in drowsiness,
the flaccid cheeks or a fleeting instant when I go back
to the same deceript man of years past,
a prodigious creature under the tamarind tree
playing with an umbrella and his grandson.
I had trimmed my wife, offshoots all, like a lemon tree
to bear this fruit. Oh how well she managed the pain,
I would remember during my next life,
So precise shall be my stare
that the wall will drill a hole,
the noise of whistles and the drum
will bear ambiguities, sprout pleasant moments when
I shall discourage explanations and see the yellow
butterflies borne by the breeze, their wings resting.
And of my father in ashes underground, I will remember
his nails growing bigger everyday as the workers
retreat to their family, an involuntary exercise.
But his chest was a bellows when he died and he tried
to say something which nobody heard.
What did he whisper- -oh God, what?