When I’m walking,
I am an automobile!
Free
To mark and measure
The pace and pressure
Of my gaze and gait,
My toes and heels.
As free as a
Thoreau walking
To Walden Pond
From his log cabin.
Yet when I'm walking,
I’m at the mercy
Of motors and vectors,
Of gazes quick to judge
A straying of the hem,
A splaying of the feet,
A raking of the dust...
As unfree as a Mrs Thoreau
Amid a crowd
Of Concord carriages.
Ananya Dutta Gupta teaches at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. She has articles, translations, essays and travelogues to her credit. Her poetry responds to her immediate human milieu and non-human environs with a combination of curiosity, intuitiveness and criticality. She has published with Muse India, Gulmohur Quarterly, Indian Periodical, Indian Ruminations, Teesta Review, RoughKhata, and Cafe Dissensus. A poem of hers – ‘Howrah Junction’ – was one among twenty internationally selected entries in Global Conversations published by CRASSH, Cambridge (2021). Ananya’s debut collection, For Tomorrow the Birds Might Still Sing (Santiniketan: Birutjatio, 2021) is in circulation now.