Pride Poem by Tamal Kundu

The old house stands still.
Rot has set in.
A flying termite caught in the webs of a dead spider, sway to the shrill of a ceiling fan.
All things sway.
Dreams rise and suffocate in the mouldering  mortars
Falling on the adjacent tiled roof. 
They scream, laugh, make love, declare the infiniteness 
Of their finite existence through diatribes of reality and unreality.

They are passionate bunch,  
Bound by their common desire to be. And blood. 
And the house just is. It still is. 
Once there were sparrows in the ventilators. 
And envious bayas on the palm trees. 
The ripples in the pond sing their dark, merry tunes
Licking away its edges,  
And they shove and trample for the whiff of north wind.

Life persists in slow, lonely decadence. 
The cactus on the roof thrives in monsoon and in summer. 
Basil live and die, live and die trenched in the never ending circle 
Of micro-civilisation. 
The house harvests its own sustenance in the whispers among its bricks
That become a collective 
And a roar is heard. 
They pray to Earth.

The old house is defiant,  
The old house is tired. 
Its melting skin sizzles and stinks of industry of old,  
A glorious past always in the distant like the horizon,  
The promise of bright future exposed to the misery
That is naturalness of time. 
The hammer rusted, weed has grown over,  
They clinch onto the sickle like oxygen.