“The Poet” by Lopamudra Banerjee
“Once, After a Torrent: Prose-Poem” by Lopamudra Banerjee
My love, once you had gone so far as to love the fire within me. I did not think
then, some day you would burn away the fiery bird, running to and fro within
my neatly feminine voice, your sensual fuel.
Once, my love, you had colored me in wild hues, the red of my heart,
The blue of my veins, the green of my fertile womb. Have you ever known, how I
too have craved to lick, suck away the red, crisp edges of your heart?
How I would barge into your home, that primal nook of yours and become your
bubbled-up Venus?
I, that unacknowledged Dalit girl who might have emerged like a nameless egg
from the pits of the cracked earth, I, who have lived so much in your lustful eyes
that the mirror has shown me your hunger a zillion times. I, who have loved you
with such vigor that I run away from you, ingesting your kicks and blows, and
then, come back like that ghostly phone call you get
after a tiresome, earth-shattering torrent.
Didn’t I ever tell you I would come back at my own will, from Burma to
Bangladesh, from Sri Lanka to the crowning glory of the Taj, being the sandbar,
my subterranean flow, drowning the sanctioned peripheries of your home?
Wait, do you seek the embers of yet another fallen love in my smudged vermilion,
Did you sense ruins in my crimson lips?
My love, once you had gone so far as to eclipse yourself in my dense, dark undone.
My love, once you had vowed to leave everything behind, live penniless in the
crooked streets, sheltered only by the moonbeams tucked under my cheap, crinkled
sari. As I look into your eyes today, just after that earth-shattering torrent, it’s not
the whiplashes of that self-deprecating love, not the juvenile teardrops of the tyrant
memories, not the fierce bleeding rose of my tender eighteen.
I seek the primal fire, the scandalous crescendo and fall in my blood and veins, a
charred anthem of an unborn revolution.
Originally composed for the Women’s History Month in 2022, and later rendered as a performance poetry piece in Dallas, Texas in 2023, this prose-poem is written in the voice of angst and rebellion of the feminine sprit, and also has some sparks of a bold love poem.
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Lopamudra Banerjee Artist Statement: At the outset, I must acknowledge that life has given me the bounty of poetry and language, enabling me to break some shackles in my own small way. I am an Indian Diaspora writer and poet in the US with my humble roots in Kolkata, India. Words and their nuances, the strange concoction of images had invaded my private space many years ago. Today, with several published books and anthologies of my own, writing is still my innermost sacred space, the intuitive reality lurking in my senses when I try to make sense of the hubris of life around me.
My writing and my art is my very intimate, sacred process of being one with my inner self, to identify the ways of the Universe and to feel myself close to our creator, the almighty God. It is damn lonely, the life of an artist. The process of creating alternate worlds with our writing definitely won’t matter to most people around us, but that is the whole magic behind its creation.
