Translated from the Bengali by Monosija Banerjee
He was merely water—
How long can you put
such bottomless pit on a pedestal anyway.
I felt a newfound sense of loneliness
in me today;
Sketched a wooden ship.
I can’t seem to remember
if it had a mast
It probably didn’t have all that a good ship
usually has,
Only a bleak silhouette.
There was nothing but water everywhere
Wayward senses;
The sky too was pitch-black, a supermarket for stars.
Clouds hadn’t curdled from their veiled mist yet.
If the wooden ship sinks,
Would memories of this submarine
make you cry?
You weren’t mine, even in the dark
Tomorrow you too would become
an abandoned lighthouse, mangled in its bones.
Mandakranta Sen (1972- ) is a Bengali poet, lyricist, dramatist and composer from West Bengal. She received the Sahitya Akademi Golden Jubilee Award for her poetry in 2004.
Monosija Banerjee is an aspiring poet from Kolkata. She is a post-graduate in English from Calcutta University. She was longlisted for the Great Indian Poetry Contest, conducted by On Fire Movement in 2017. Her work has appeared in the anthology A Letter A Poem A Home, curated by Airplane Poetry Movement in 2020.