Deyasini Roy

Two Poems

PC -pexels

Did You Know?

Did you know the cupboard 
that day woke up in a jolt
of vibrant turquoise?
In his earthen brown coat
of our morning coffee
And played the old chorus of 
grandmum's running fingers:
Trickles of 'nolen gur' in sunset ginger
Those were our seasons running~
Summers, rains, winters in 'boyems'
of 'achaar', 'namkeen' and 'narus'.

Our gardener Armchair rests 
in the comfort of our verandah
Beside the lovingly tended 
Gramophone blooms in decorative pots
The bright colours of home waxing 
and waning on his dark silky body
Feeding his muddy pores and boots,
the crumbfilled toaster of memories
Just then the Cupboard played:
“Amar onge onge ke bajaye,
 bajaye banshi”........
The Armchair swings
and the thunder rolls
A gush of dark.
Who is there? Who is there? I ask.
And the curtain falls.

The Photoframe mistress living
next to 'Our Fireplace Lane 102'
wakes me up the next morning.
I get back to my usual tea of lemon honey.
The rain has stopped.
The earthy smell of the white sari
glistens and calms a fevered forehead.

Mama's Gangrene

 [With apologies to T.S. Eliot]

**April is the cruellest month,
Time for a change in skin colour 
From red to purple to black
You will not know. It comes silently,
tiptoes into your womb like the 
Embryo of a lilac memory 
You will not know and home 
the cancer within you-
Until its tiny red heart starts
beating one fine day
And you find your skin pale
and turn grey like sun-blasted 
bodies of purplish red, crashing,
pounding as it matures in a day.
You feel the flutters somersault into
kicks on your lower limbs
The skin glows with a hollow cry
of a bubbly dew drop~ trembling,
throbbing and one fine day you
hear a crackling sound and can't
figure out if it is the heart in peroxide- 
hydrogen or the clotted betadine brain
For it is April again, the mustard stirs
the rotten roots and burns the skin
The salty lips on the right edge of
her foot opens and sings
It's mouth wide open to form 'O'
the pain deeper than mantras, 
numbing. At night, the pus forges
its own sea-song, foamed and
frothed and dribbles onto the sand.
I wake up to the foul songs of April
The time for a change in skin colour
From red to purple to black.

Mama’s Gangrene

 [With apologies to T.S. Eliot]

**April is the cruellest month,
Time for a change in skin colour 
From red to purple to black
You will not know. It comes silently,
tiptoes into your womb like the 
Embryo of a lilac memory 
You will not know and home 
the cancer within you-
Until its tiny red heart starts
beating one fine day
And you find your skin pale
and turn grey like sun-blasted 
bodies of purplish red, crashing,
pounding as it matures in a day.
You feel the flutters somersault into
kicks on your lower limbs
The skin glows with a hollow cry
of a bubbly dew drop~ trembling,
throbbing and one fine day you
hear a crackling sound and can't
figure out if it is the heart in peroxide- 
hydrogen or the clotted betadine brain
For it is April again, the mustard stirs
the rotten roots and burns the skin
The salty lips on the right edge of
her foot opens and sings
It's mouth wide open to form 'O'
the pain deeper than mantras, 
numbing. At night, the pus forges
its own sea-song, foamed and
frothed and dribbles onto the sand.
I wake up to the foul songs of April
The time for a change in skin colour
From red to purple to black.

Deyasini Roy is a budding young poet who hails from Chandannagar, a small town in the Indian state of West Bengal. She’s recently completed her Postgraduate degree in English and Comparative Literature from Pondicherry University, India. She’s contributed to various anthologies and journals of repute and is associated with Tell Me Your Story in multiple creative capacities. She loves to set recourse to the idyllic and pastoral and record her impressionably sensitive response to the lilting cadence of nature rendered in a swirl of lurid slashes and subtle brush strokes.