Joydeep Sircar

Born ignorant, as the hormones activate
the other love, huge as the universe,
we learn with all our senses each bright letter
...

Prince of gamebirds and master of crooked flight, the snipe
the sea at dusk brought in as prisoner
looked at me with bright obsidian eyes
gently refused food and clumsy care
...

The mirror holds a countenance of grief
seamed with the lines you and the years incised.
It's over at last, I think, without relief.
...

We who had loved you abandoned you at the end.
Sunk in our individual miseries,
a failing family betrayed a trust, lost that
one true enduring selfless love it had found:
...

(For Rono and Arun, vanished beyond Madmaheshwar in the Garhwal Himalaya,1984)

Faint bells on a crystal wind.
A gentle pass.
...

Younghusband's ghost haunts Padamchen.
Tarmac runs where mule tracks went.
The road from Zuluk climbs in zags.
Wind whips Buddhist prayer-flags.
...

'I'm sorry, ' said the young and beautiful blonde.
'There's nothing more for me to live for now'.
The convenient pistol, poison, or large pond.
...

Xenophon of Cos ministers to the lame
and earnest emperor. Seneca, exiled, vents
his stoic rage on the salt Corsican air.
...

Two marches back the whispers had begun
about a camper dead, mauled by a bear,
somewhere ahead. At Pandava Bridge at noon
...

The doctrine of personal responsibility
is easier to state
than to live up to.
...

Mother Courage from Fyzabad, thirty four,
(married at fourteen to a violent drunk
who broke four of her front teeth before
giving her five quick babies and falling dead,
...

My earliest memories smell of dope
and shapes of balsa wings and fin
and a squat red screaming CL stunt
which one day went and barrelled in.
...

Every year must you come around,
greatest of heroes, most awkward of men,
to shame us with your unsolvable paradox -
the dichotomy between means and end?
...

In dark sleep slumbers the street,
...

The woofers boom a bit before midnight
calling the faithful to the rites of autumn,
robbing you of the window of respite
...

We are separated by age and continents.
If our paths had crossed we might have found
...

What gave her mind the charity to test
sharp judgment against the thumb of truth?
...

Women are simply...... Well, just women.
The second sex, the female eunuch....
Heavens! What will they think of next
to describe themselves?
...