I see you busy in your work.
Your hair, more white than black, is thin
And falls loosely over your shoulders;
There is a vein that beats prominently
Above your forehead, and your hands
Now gently shake when you are tired.
Your clothes sit light on you, the lines
On your face speak of the years in the sun;

You are not now the same person you were.
The back that bore the weight of three children
Is somewhat bent with time;
You had walked out of home to work
Overcoming the loud small-town voices
And your own shyness; they are silent now.
You were made of iron, but that too rusts.

I think of all this, and time, and sorrow.
You see me and conscious of my gaze
You smile your smile of missing teeth.
You are old, like silver, beautiful:
You seem to have walked out of a painting
By Raphael or some Renaissance master;

I cannot breathe, I am overcome:
There are days like this when we live
As if death or time did not matter,
When it is bliss just to be alive;

You tell me it may rain, to take the umbrella.
Among the most mundane things to say;
And all I think is how grateful I am
For life and you and everything,
And how old age should be exactly like this:
To have lived a life doing the things you love
Being the mistress of the small things,
Watching what you gave your heart to take shape.

Diptesh Ghosh

Drunk with beauty,
Wearing an old ache in my heart
I have traveled the world.
I might be fifty, I might be fifteen,
But I have scanned the stars in foreign lands,
And heard the wind’s voice in strange woods;

I have no home.
There’s tomorrow waiting and a little house.
But I have felt the rains open up on me
Unrestrained, never holding back;
My soul has grown moss-fed in the rains.
I have given my heart to the road.

What do I want?
I seek the lyrical curves of the wide road.
It was bliss to stay awake on cold nights
To watch how the new day slowly breaks.
Be young forever, my roving dreams.
Do not run out on me, untraveled road.

Weary of the world,
An exile from the tired towns
I have come now to autumn in these woods.
The leaves are falling on quiet roads
Like sheets of paper tossed by wild students.
I must write of these things. You write to me.

Diptesh Ghosh

We stitch our days
Into the fabric of our lives;

I have lost the old craft.
The design has gone awry;
Instead of one theme I have many;
Here is happiness and sorrow,
A patch of regrets
And this knot of indifference;

I have put them together.
It does not dazzle
Like a brilliant tapestry.

It is a patchwork quilt.
Like me, shapeless and plain;
But it tells a story,
And it keeps me warm.

Diptesh Ghosh

My thoughts this evening are
As tangled as my wind-blown hair.
The years, like thieves, have fallen upon me:
Like a lover, gray age remembers me now,
I, who have not thought of her even once;

I’m old and fat and stooped with worry
But my ignorant heart knows it not.
The winds of spring still blow
Though spring is already long gone;

After all the years, by way of pretext,
I still find means to come, when asked:
To fix a broken bulb, to run an errand,
To check up on you, when you are ill;
But you know, like each time in the past,
It was really to see you once again.

Perhaps there are no boundaries
To yearnings, to love, and to foolishness;

I have dreams of such exotic shades,
Time has not dimmed them a bit:
But I do not want to be that lonely man
Who had lovely dreams once,
But kept them stored in a glass case,
Untested by the winds and brown earth;

I want to burn and fail and taste
Such magnificent, spectacular failures,
I want to have lived at least once
Before my living days were over.

With my arms, perhaps, I cannot touch the sky.
But I want to be the foolish one,
Who reached out,
Knowing all this, nonetheless.

It is spring, the sun is shining.
Happiness is a dragonfly
Flitting from flower to flower
On the shallow edges
Of my heart’s placid lake;

In the shadows, in deep waters,
Something lurks motionless.
Sorrow does not move.
It waits.

Diptesh Ghosh

I’ve placed the sweet jasmines, dawn fresh,
By your bedside, in a bowl of water;
They will barely last out this long day.
But all day, brief day, your hours
Will be scented with the sweetness
Of something that is perfect,
Something that is fading fast,
Something only for you.

Diptesh Ghosh

Perfumed happiness lingers
The fragrance you had put on;
A whiff of lavender
Long after you have gone.

Diptesh Ghosh