3 POEMS by Debasis Mukhopadhyay

 

The pretty secret of the Butterfly

At last she’s dead
She’s only peace
Survived by a daughter
Who wonders
Who will tell her now
The secret of the butterfly

At bottom and head
Patterned wounds
Stopped screaming voiceless
When you knocked the wind out of your sails
Are you still dragging them with you, ma
The daughter might ask
Watching the blue of the sky
That stood on fence yesterday
Just like today
Ma, du hast es besser
No tumbledown castles
No useless memory and wasted poems
Ma, you have got it better

And she would jump again from the window
She’s only death
* Author’s note: The poem is written with Samantha Hunt on mind. A poet from Birmingham, U.K. who recently passed away. The poem borrows its title from the work of Emily Dickenson & uses the famous epigram of Goethe “Amerika, du hast es besser”.

 

 

Mourning

And so they found you dead
The theatre closed
How did you get this way
Mourning

Old times
When you used to hear
How would your life change
Mourning
Timeless now
The rat takes the cheese

There’s something else
The dog is barking
Buried in me
And you are ready to take its place

 

 

This is an edited extract

Nothing sailed or there was no sea
Awake in bed our fingers to find them
We learn to exchange swaddled flowers for subtle knives
Nights devolve into a song of ribs

We then sleep too deeply to remember in dream
We made a deal by not giving in to either side
We had a stake in
That blood spills correctly in merriment of love
And it gets everything it asks for

 

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DEBASIS MUKHOPADHYAY lives and writes in Montreal, Canada. He has a PhD in literary studies from Université Laval, Quebec and poems published in several magazines in the USA & UK including Yellow Chair Review, Thirteen Myna Birds, Of/With, Silver Birch Press, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Foliate Oak, Eunoia Review, Snapping Twig, Fragments of Chiaroscuro, Words Surfacing, The Curly Mind, I am not a silent poet, With Painted Words. Follow him at https://debasismukhopadhyay.wordpress.com/ or @dbasis_m on Twitter.