I pick up what is left of me.
All day I’ve cut myself and bled.
Suddenly the world is at war:
Everywhere I step is a mine-field,
Everything is wrapped in barbed wires.

I sit in front of my window, pause.
The trenches have taken their toll.
The skirmish has gone too long.
My old Enfield has proved useless,
And I could never use the bayonet.

In my pocket beats your letter.
I have carried it all day, knowing.
It rests, like a grenade, against my heart.
You said nothing: but the dusk spoke
With a sadness akin to your voice;

I know what it says, but I wait.
One last long puff… I pull the pin.

Diptesh Ghosh

The seed of grief has found a way
Into my heart;
Darkness waits, like a winter night,
Lurking, waiting;

Just when I make peace with darkness
You smile at me,
Unexpectedly, in the darkness
A lighted window.

Diptesh Ghosh

If we were in love
And the government, in all their wisdom,
Banned all conversations altogether
A vast silence would reign
In smoky coffee halls and crowded streets…
Silent like libraries;

There would be no way
Of speaking of forbidden things except
For writing them down in letters:
Every day I would send
Pages detailing out your smile, my love,
Your beautiful dark eyes;

But if the jealous bureaucrats
Rationed the use of words, limiting spends,
I would still write only to you
One by one, till all words,
Like precious bank balance ran out slowly,
Like sunlight in winter;

Even then I would not quite stop.
I would send you these blank sheets of paper.
Every day, till the last of days:
If they took the sheets away
My parched lips shall move silently
Narrating to the wind;

And my love shall be written in blank sheets.
Only the wind and you
Will know what they say.

Diptesh Ghosh

A continent breaks up slowly
And imperceptibly;

Life is an album of old photographs,
The prints are faded and dull.
If only they could make a fresh copy…
But the negatives are long gone.

Questions lurk where answers lingered.
They smile with uncertain eyes.
The wine tastes unusually sour,
And the cigarette smoke is stale.

The stars above waiting, knowing.
The two listen to the silence
Grasping for something to say
But they have nothing. Alas.

The furiously beating heart
Was nothing more than a moment:
The house was built on a cliff
The cliff was toppling, slowly.

Diptesh Ghosh

When I go to the woods
I do not write “I was here”
On the bark of some tree;
I do not leave plastic bags,
Or cups and beer bottles
To commemorate my stay;

It is enough that I see
Unobtrusively, for a while,
The forest aflame in autumn,
As white water rushes down
The green ancient mountains
Under a benign blue sky;

I do not need too much more:
The deer will graze again,
Here where I stand watching;
The daisies will grow quietly,
And rain will fall on this meadow
When I leave without a footprint;

So it should be with my life.
Too much value is given
To the quest for permanence;
I shall be like the summer wind
That passes through the woods
Invisible but scented:

It shall not matter when I’m gone.
But I shall be glad to have seen
All this beauty, and these woods,
Though briefly, ah so briefly.

Diptesh Ghosh

In the quiet lake of my heart
I heard a poem flap its wings.
It nested on the shallow edges
Stirring its dark tranquil waters;

It would not stay, it flew away.
So I wrote your name on a sheet
And cast it like a paper boat
On the deserted waters:

There it still floats, like a swan,
Elegant and undisturbed,
Far more perfect and complete
Than any poem I ever wrote.

Diptesh Ghosh

August

A rain drop still lingers
On the tip of a green leaf
Long after the dark clouds
Have dispersed from the sky;

Like the drop that shimmers
In the corner of your eyes,
Silent, out of season, and beautiful;

March

The first leaf breaks free, quite unnoticed,
Like the first boy back in school
After a particularly long vacation;
Soon the quiet hills will resound
With the cries of those yet to come
The forest that is yet to wake;


December

Steaming tea in hand I watch
The wind blow through the green valley
Singing a tune that must resonate
With the young saplings of oak and Birch:

They sway and flutter fiercely.
They shake and tumble with the wind.
If they were not rooted,
They too would fly.

Diptesh Ghosh

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

When you walk towards me from the distance
Waving those slender hands, ivory white,
Calling my name aloud so familiarly,
I’m always caught completely unprepared.

I’ve been watching you as you move across
The vast room talking to all these strangers,
Laughing at their jokes, whispering secrets,
Holding a drink in your long fingers;

Dark raven hair on white shoulders, it’s like
You’ve walked out of a book I read long ago.
You have streaked through my faltering heart
Like a meteor blazes through the dark skies.

There is so much I would like to tell you.
If you had my heart and felt the way I do,
If you could see yourself through my eyes,
All my purposeless days would be at an end.

But instead, I raise my love weary hand,
With the practiced ease of one long in use,
And put on this casual, disinterested smile
And then nonchalantly wave back at you.

Diptesh Ghosh

This man is not me: someone dark
Has taken over me:
He pulls me towards pettiness
And hollow acts of shame.
I resist much, but he is strong,
And I’m just a boy in a man’s shoes.

He is deliberately mean.
I strike back with kindness.
He talks of drab despair;
But I retain vibrant dreams.
Like a chess grandmaster
I attack with my random goodness.

But only one of us
Will stand in the end.
If you see me and I don’t smile
Somehow you know the worst.

And if I embrace you
With unfeigned eagerness,
Know that I’ve seen the dark side
But returned back, only for you.

Diptesh Ghosh

Silent girl,
Who harbors cryptic thoughts,
I love your inscrutable dark eyes;
I can hear,
The perfect note of deep sadness
That resonates in your silver laugh.
Queen like
You hold back your unspoken words
While I fumble with the poor sentences;
I can read
The ancient scripts, but am illiterate
To what is clearly written in your eyes.
Leave the silent ways to the old queens
And heartless gods;
It is spring already in the mountains,
Let your heart sing.

Diptesh Ghosh

What shall I call you? I do not know your name.
I’ve heard you speak my name in the silent night
The way one hears the blowing wind
Or the rain or the falling leaves.

My heart is heavy, my failures great. The note
Of deep sadness in your voice echoes through me;
I need to see your lips, your face,
To your voice I must give a name.

When you called me
I could not answer.
What shall I call you?
I do not know your name.

Diptesh Ghosh

Like me, evening lingers,
In uneasy balance;
The day is almost over,
And dark night waits.
The dusk trembles, shimmers,
This order cannot last:
One push, one unkind word,
And the red sun will set.
At the threshold, I wait too,
For your final impetus:
I cannot come back to you,
And I cannot move on.

Diptesh Ghosh

We sit in the shadows of the mountains
Under the quivering aspen tree;
The rocks older than all mankind
Watch over you and me.

The constellations unfold, one by one,
And stars twinkle, as if they knew,
Despite the briefness of existence,
The love I feel for you.

Diptesh Ghosh

When I am old (I mean older) I will
Not accept what the young will let me have:
My booming laugh will scare my pretensions
Of wisdom away. I’ll be fun, talk light
And smile at will; when working men pass by,
All brown and stretched by the long working hours
I’ll talk of lazy summer noons and soft
Evenings; I will wash away my kindness.

I’ll spend my fortunes (if someday I’m rich)
On flippant things: maybe I’ll learn to fly,
Or spend my weekends seeking sunken gold
In Bahamas all alone; I will try
New things: I’ll wear red when I please and paint
My house the deepest purple shade; I’ll eat
What I desire, drink *** on afternoons,
And pretend to chase all the prettiest girls.

When I am old (I mean older) I will
Grow eccentric. But still on winter nights
When I’m alone (which will be every night)
I’ll write (till weary eyes permit) the poems
I write to you: that will not change with age.
Like an old fruit, wrinkled and ripe, I’ll slide
Into blank nothingness carrying just your thoughts:
I’ll persist, still unfulfilled, still yearning.

Diptesh Ghosh

Early morning
After a sleepless night
Of thunderstorms and shrieking winds;
Now this clear dawn, the empty roads,
This sleeping world:
The orange ball rises, shyly,
Turning the snow-white peaks red,
Lighting the green valley
That lies ripe with yellow mustard.

Utterly beautiful,
Quite impossible
That such loveliness exists.

I am greedy.
I have this strange yearning
For an off-season mango,
And your presence;
The mango months
Are half a year away,
And you and I
Are forever split by the bounds
Of customs and propriety.

But this is a make believe world.
I find you by my side,
Laughing at my mango fondness;
You ask me, sleepy eyed,
If I too find such dawns lovely:
I answer, tongue-in cheek,
With a warm smile,
“Impossibly so”.

Diptesh Ghosh

Nothing lands here anymore
Except swallows and sparrows:
The fields cannot remember
The last airplane that landed
On what was once an airport.

The runways have slowly yielded
Inch by inch, every corner,
To hungry weeds and silent woods;
The tufts of coarse September grass
Have reclaimed most of the land.

The wind blows through the wild grass.
Twittering larks have replaced
The cough of busy engines;
Only wild flowers and prickly weeds
Bear testimony to this change.

In the overgrown sal thickets
An owl proclaims what is obvious:
Nothing really was meant to last.
In the end there’s always change.
And that is fair compensation.

Diptesh Ghosh

And so it comes to this: the end of days,
The sum of starlit nights and rain-washed years
I spent with friends who lie stone dead in fields
Of Troy. My faithful Andromache waits
With Astyanax, my son: I wish my stay
Would last one summer more; to see him grow,
To lie with her in balmy autumn nights,
And rest in fields where Golden barley grows.

But Achilles waits: no war is ever just,
And he is young, a boy who seeks his fame,
He does not understand my love for life.
The gods have foretold this: but I will not
Take shelter behind walls. I see old death;
He waits for me. What can a mortal do
When gods take sides, and all our years are bound
In dice that fates have rolled; and now death waits.

As long as mankind exists, Achilles wants
His name to last, but I just want to live
In peace, to tend my goats and watch the sun
In lands where neither men nor gods seek blood;
But Achilles waits: and death is waiting too.
And all my yesteryears have led to this:
This field, this god-infested ground, and I
Wait sword in hand for death: I am ready.

Diptesh Ghosh

Two scholars discuss life in a gray library.
They dissect beauty into precise compartments,
They speak softly of fleetingness of time.

Outside a breeze is blowing through green paddy fields.
A clump of wild flowers have blossomed early.
A goatherd lies in the grass with nothing to do.

Time is passing fast in the dusty libraries.
But in green fields Time lingers, half in love with spring.

Diptesh Ghosh

Something in dusty corners of my heart
Seems to have lost its sting: the broken dreams
That haunted me so long, all sorrows old,
Those regrets have disappeared. Once again
My life is filled with promises of things:
I hear the footsteps of joys yet to come.

The world is still the same, I know; the flaws
Still run in me. But I cannot shake off
This happiness that clings to me so long
Like your lavender smell. It’s raining now
And you are coming here: a brand new poem
Is walking towards my long-waiting heart.

Diptesh Ghosh

A late September day
Under a perfectly blue sky
The restless wind ravels
The yellow leaves of Maple
As they fall gently on the ground.

I see no one around:
The pastured fields lie bare,
And the roads are empty.
Somewhere in the dark woods
A nameless bird breaks into a song.

Between the barren rocks
A clump of tiny weeds
Have sprouted to bright life;
And in the horizon,
Rows and rows of dark evergreens.

My heart suddenly aches
With a deep yearning for something:
Despite all the losses,
I cannot but be glad,
On this wind-swept autumnal day.

Diptesh Ghosh

Your thoughts have drifted into my heart
Like the first clouds in the eastern skies,
Moist with fragrance of the distant rains.
The summer was long: the thirsty roots
And the babbling brooks have dried up
Like green dreams, withered in the sun.
I know these dark clouds will not burst forth
As chattering rain on my window-panes;
But the day is dark, and I seek darkness.
Lightning streaks the sky with a promise,
To fall with unrestrained joy one day:
Not here, not now, but someplace else.
Diptesh Ghosh

Evening falls gently on the resting mountainside.
The last colors linger in the multi-colored west.
Cicadas sing in the dark woods and crickets chirp,
The wood-shrikes and fly-catchers are now in their nest.

The long day is now done, and regrets are a waste,
My problems seem fleeting, insubstantial, and vain:
My shallow victories fade, my ills disappear,
When all things cease to matter, only you remain.

Diptesh Ghosh

I sit under the deodar tree
Watching the valley far below:
A few fireflies flicker, briefly,
But the bright lights of the valley
Mock at their short-lived brightness.
Far above me,
The million stars,
And the bright moon
Keep their silence.

Diptesh Ghosh

The world has cast its spell on me.
I’m caught in her net of loveliness.
Like a fish I gape, open-eyed,
In wonder, forever and ever:

The star-laden cosmos unfolds,
Infinite, endless, with no borders;
How do the planets move in sync?
Exact, perfect, never out of step!
I can barely keep my car in line.

Nothing I see is plain, or mundane.
Dawn shines on saffron-shaded peaks,
Evening sets on the purple rocks.
The sea rushes in and retreats,
Across the white sands, the dark shores
Resounding with deep loneliness;

Seasons change -- the blue waters flow
Past green fields, yellow with mustard,
Apple trees rich with white blossoms --
Till the winter winds shake them down.
Every day, I wake up, somehow,
And find silver strands in my hair,
New wrinkles in my ageing skin…
All things change, one by one, while Time
Playfully lingers, unchanged, timeless.

Wonder comes to me, on certain feet.
How beautiful the world, how diverse.
And here I am, a lost traveler,
Stranded under the swirling stars!

Diptesh Ghosh

A gray winter morning,
Cold and silent;
Shrouded in the gray mist,
Even the birds are sleeping.

I think of the great silences:
Lonely winding roads after dusk,
The quiet, leather-bound libraries,
The forever unsaid words…
From the lips of the newly dead;

And then, somehow, I think of you
Drifting somewhere in this wide world;
We are separated by a million hearts,
In the cacophony of voices,
Just two voiceless strangers,
With so much left to say.

I am a star, among the countless stars,
Frozen in a dark universe,
Utterly silent, oblivious
To the babble of the planets.

Diptesh Ghosh

At this time of evening prayer,
And the hour of quiet solitude,
I keep aside my favorite books,
My art, all the unfinished plans,
My dreams of life yet to begin;

I try to recall what perhaps
May not be true: the stolen look
In your cryptic eyes, the recurring
Touch of hands in our daily work.
The smile that may be meant for me.

Diptesh Ghosh

Only the rain falls silently
Like the happy years before;
On the house where we spent our years,
But can return never more.

Diptesh Ghosh

Old names, old friends, old loves,
Are now slowly fading away,
Like the places we have been to,
Homes that we have lived in:

They exist like names on the map,
Or like faces in old albums.
A mist has fallen over them
We have forgotten the way there.

We remember them with fondness
But we cannot go back ever
Except in half-remembered dreams,
In storm tossed lonely winter nights.

Diptesh Ghosh

The trees start whispering as evening comes.
Birds return, one by one, into their nests.
And then, night falls, and all is still
Except the falling leaves and rustling wind;

From my window, I look through the branches
Of the Oak tree into the starlit sky;
An owl hoots in the dark forest,
Leafy, mysterious, the cry of the night;

I stay up late, sleepless, windows open.
Time is tripping by as the soft wind blows.
The voice in my heart hums with joy.
All is well: the world just as it should be.

Diptesh Ghosh

This gray December evening
A bird is singing in the woods.
Happiness, like the bird,
Has entered my heart,
Not knowing it is winter.

My heart opens up
Like a wild flower
In a disused graveyard.

Diptesh Ghosh

Nothing is ever lost; the pebbled brook
White graveled, barren, and all season dry,
Suddenly springs to life with July rains;
The windblown seeds that float on summer days
Like witch’s hair, drop softly on the ground;
Buried in catacombs of earth, they lie
Almost dead, but not quite: when the rain falls
They wake from verdant dreams: They were not lost.

Life does not stop: sometimes it stands frozen.
Though all that you have done may seem wasted,
Though delicate dreams have shattered and your heart
Feels reluctant to leave the broken ruins,
Nothing was lost: your efforts did not fail.
The strongest ice will melt, the sun will shine:
Though love might not find reflection in life
Yet kindness will meet kindness face to face.

Diptesh Ghosh

One day I’ll leave this town for good.
No one shall know I’m gone
Till some trespasser on my lawns
Makes sense of the silence,
The piles of newspapers and mail,
The cobwebbed porch and flourishing weeds.

I would be gone and won’t look back.
I shall seek the future:
The road that’s yet to be traveled,
Mistakes yet to be made,
New towns to wake up in, new friends,
All the stories yet to be told.

And nothing would hold me back.
This free spirit will be
The greatest of all my triumphs;

But since nothing would hold me back
This uncompromised freedom
Will be my only regret.

Diptesh Ghosh

I see you by the fence
Under the yellow Gulmohur;
The summer wind rustles the leaves
And your raven hair has come loose.
Is it night already?

In your orange dress and blue scarf
You have walked out of a painting
By Vermeer; The Street is silent.
If only I could kneel at your feet
And tear open my sorrowful heart.

But you turn to me and smile
And say something about the weather;
All I can do is mumble and nod
And say in a matter-of-fact way,
“It is going to be a fine day”.

Diptesh Ghosh