The Prisoner

Let him look from his little cell-window

Let once allow him to look at the vast open sky

And the floating eagles there.

Let him once feel the free

Free spreading of wings

Feel the stormy wind blowing through the feathers…

The man, tired and bent with the burden of age,

Coiled on his wooden cot, 
Fully wrapped by the torn old blanket, 
Now leaves only a face…
Crushed and unshaven.

The face… 
Where once emotion and expressions abodes,

Now only shows a stiff-embarrassing-permanence.

Secluded and rejected by the universe out

The man, with a heart vulnerable 
Even to the slightest sympathetic touch,

Now looks down the prison-yard with eyes

Eager, still expressionless…

Let him peep through his prison-window

Let him see the fragile bud of roses near the well

Let him once feel the colour…

And imagine the fragrance through the air…

Let his mind gather some cold soft dews,

The winter spread pearl-drops over the leaves of grass,

Let him once rest his feet on the wet field,

And soft rays of sun fall on his face…

Let him once, O you, 
The duty bound merciless prison guards, 

Allow, to move down the field

And feel free…

Free as the Eagle…
Soft as the Dew drops…

Colourful as the Rose…
And warm as the Sunshine.

For God’s sake, 
Turn your eyes blind for a while

And let the Prisoner feel

Yet there are a few things for him…

He is not all that desolate…

He has the Rose for him…

And the Sunshine still embraces him 
With eternal affection…

Deserted from the rest of the relations,

Yet he has one handful of Sun 
And a Rose, 
A red Rose

To offer him smell with unquestionable dedication.

Colouring The Christmas!!!

A Humble Approach 
To Add Some Extra Colour 
To Your Jubilant Festive Spirit....

Merry Christmas 
To 
All of You... 

A Look Into You

Whenever I look at you full
'Tis not you I look at.
I look deep inside you
Inside your flesh and skin,
There, inside, hidden in some
Deepest corner of your decaying rotten flesh
Lies the heart, the touch and the feel;
That only the deities can possess
And only Heaven can dream to have;
When I look at you,
'Tis that I look at...


When I thrush my face
Between the stinking rotten set of meat
I search for that Heavenly Touch...


I only wanted that...wanted that to be mine,
Mine alone....all mine.


The Heart, the Touch and Feel....
You are all that....


And nothing but that!






(A Tribute to a friend, may be whose abode is in some other universe....Far..Far From This Madding Crowd)

Jamaica Farewell...

by

 Erving Burgess

and 

Harry Belafonte 

"Down the way where the nights are gay

And the sun shines daily on the mountain top

I took a trip on a sailing ship

And when I reached Jamaica I made a stop...

But I'm sad to say, I'm on my way

Won't be back for many a day

My heart is down, my head is turning around

I had to leave a little girl in Kingston town...

Sounds of laughter everywhere

And the dancing girls swaying to and fro

I must declare that my heart is there

Though I've been from Maine to Mexico....

But I'm sad to say, I'm om my way...

And won't be back for many a day...

My heart is down, my head is turning around

I had to leave a little girl in Kingston town..."

The Flowering Jacaranda

The gigantic Jacaranda stood in the middle of the campus… underneath which, the little kids of the locality stand queued up every morning with their hands drawn to their breasts to perform the praying ritual.

Usually they sung the famous patriotic song of D. L. Roy “Dhana Dhannye Pushpe Bhora, Amader Ei Basundhora” (Our mother Earth is full of rich wealthy grains). The early morning air was enchanted by the immature voices of some two hundred children of various ages; sometimes some mature ones from the Teachers were also participated.

They were such a delightful crowd to watch! With dark blue and white uniform…blue trousers for the boys and blue skirts for the girls…they really look marvelous under the Jacaranda overloaded with pinkish violet flowers.

It was a noted kindergarten school of the town, entering where all the visitors were first welcomed by the South American origin Jacaranda with its waving boughs and the spray of soft pinkish-violet petals. The Jacaranda always smiled and offered the most memorable reception someone ever possibly had.

It was even the favourite most resort of the kids during the Tiffin recess. Some run through the campus… some sat under the flowering Jacaranda and ate tiffin … some collected the pink flowers scattered on the ground, trying desperately to string a garland for themselves…and some were found joyous while tossing the gathered flowers high above the sky and then letting them fall once again as if having a rain of flowers!

At one corner of the field, rather apart from the rest of the crowd, there stood two little children—one small boy, and the other, a “lady” of almost the same age.

They were completely uninterested about the playfulness of the others, and preferred it much better to spend the entire tiffin recess gazing at the flowering Jacaranda. The gigantic shape of the tree and the beautifully coloured flowers always were a cause of their wonderment. In their hearts they always nourished an unfailing love for the beautiful smiling Jacaranda.

They usually sat side by side, all speechless, just gazing at the lovely flowering tree amidst the campus of their beloved school.

It was really a marvelous sight…with no leaves seen…only the pinkish-violet petals!

It is just a memory of yesteryears now….the merciless time has snatched away all the “old familiar faces”…our memory is now dumped with some strenuous calculations of material “loss and profit”…..and we have almost forgotten that the Balance Sheet of the trivial emotions of childhood fantasies still remains unattended! The Trial Balance regarding that Gigantic Jacaranda and the heroic adoration it got from two similar aged class-mates is yet to be put up on a prescribed format, invented by the loss and profit seeker commercial-wits!            

Unaware of all these commercial and technological terminologies, please, allow a little privacy to the two infants, sitting underneath the spreading boughs; and let them look for some times at their loveliest of trees….let them gather softly a skirt-full of violet petals….and then, silently watch them moving away…….

Let them move away to the farthest corner of the garden …

 

Let them make a heap of stones there…….

And then, let them scatter the petals on that newly made churchyard……….

The eternal grave of their dearest Jacaranda……

And while they bend on their knees and pray, you, the band of Judas’ can power on your huge electric teeth to tear the violet boughs apart….and calculate some equation of loss and profit….

But…Please, Bite softly; and suppress the metallic engine sound a little…..look, the young lovers are crying profusely……..and to all the ages of Humanity, it is more sweet a sound than your machine-made one! 

• A salutation to my first school “Sishu Shiksha Kendra” of Purulia, and the lovely Jacaranda (Jacaranda mimosifolia) I met there.
• Photo Courtesy: Internet (Google Photo Search)          

A Lonesome Death

And, upon that desert of lonesome seclusion

I die, die a lonesome death.

The sun has long been past,

A soft shade of loony darkness

Covers the earth, and covers me now.

Rich is this dark, mysterious night,

But a faint beam, some ethereal light from unknown distance

Covers over my mental head.

The beam, too faint to reveal and explain

Even the simplest mysteries of human-life,

The much it reveals, it hides even more!

And, among that light and shade of deserted darkness

I die.

Die a lonesome death.

THE WAVE OF ILLUSION

A Voice In The Wilderness

A soft voice floats down the sky, from miles and miles away and finally reaches the ear—the ear of a middle-aged man, with almost white hairs and very fragile health—The voice is clearly meant for the aged-man, sitting all alone in front of his lonesome computer desk with a half empty bottle of Whiskey and a glass half filled with golden liquor that is decorated with cubes of ice.

The man, deep absorbed in his Google-Chat contacts suddenly shakes a little and his shivering hand spills some liquid on his keyboard.

The man puts the glass down and hurriedly searches for some piece of wiping cloth.

With all messes cleaned up and restored into their proper order; the man sinks back to his seat once again and finally focuses some concentration to the voice that all on a sudden has created a turmoil in his otherwise peaceful mental serenity.

The voice, echoing through the vast open realms of time reaches him like the reminiscent of a long forgotten past.

In his semi-conscious-state some one murmured in his ears: “Baba, Ghumobe Na”?—“Father, won’t you sleep”?

“Look, its already too late—the clock shows 3:30 at night—won’t you sleep? Won’t you take rest?”

“Look father, I have already made your bed—just in the way you prefer it to be…

Now, father, please come to sleep”

“You have taken a lot since evening, now leave behind all those bottles and glasses and ice-cubes and come to sleep.”

“Look father, I am here with you, just beside you,as I always were, to give you a comfortable sleep”

“Come, place your tired head onto my lap and close your eyes—I will play a soft hand through your dirty white hairs—let me once kiss you on your forehead—please close your eyes and try to get some sleep.”

The man,almost broken down, smashes away all the leftover bottles, sodas and ice-cube-boxes with one sweep of his hand and with a cracking noise they piled themselves onto the floor.

With a heavy effort the man rises up from his chair, with some hard-to- control steps tries laboriously to reach the adjoining bed—and slams himself there.

He was surely expecting someone very dear to be standing near his bed—but the lonely air of the empty house only mocks his eager expectation.

He is almost senseless—but before losing his reason and logic entirely for the rest of the night, the man suddenly groans out in an agony not to be classified, neither to be explained.

He is looking for his daughter—the voice he has been listening so far—he cried out and was eagerly expecting for some soft arms to enfold his fragile body completely and to lay a kiss on his forehead—definitely the sweetest kiss he could have during his life-time.

Then dissatisfied, the lonely father sinks into deep slumber and inside the realm of unfulfilled desires.

Only the night appears to be more dark through out the night.

Metamorphosis

Slowly, very slowly the evening sun drops down the western horizon…

The evening sky, with patches of glorious red and bright vermilion all over slowly turns to look pale…

Then the darkness of mysterious night covers up all the visual beauties of the universe…

And tries hard to take away with it all the passion and pathos of the human race…

The sun drops down…

The darkness falls…

The night begins…

The younger night slowly moves to be older….and then, more older….

The older it grows more mysterious it develops…and darker too…

All the world goes to the peaceful citadel of enchanting sleep…

Sleep through the rest of the night…

Sleep through the rest of the darkness of the night…

Sleep through the rest of the worries of life…

Sleep…till the sun awakes again and till everything goes bright with the convex gleams of the morning sun…

They will sleep in peace…

They will dream in peace…

May be sometimes a mixed expression of anguish or anger would mark a shadow on their sleepy faces…

Or, may be, sometimes, a reflection of extreme happiness would cast a hypnotic smile…

Through dreams they would cry….laugh…and quarrel…till the soft touches of the morning sun stirs them back to the universe real….

But for now…let them all sleep in peace…

Let them all dream in peace….

So, let us please concentrate on something different till the rest of the world is completely absorbed in some sleepy hours of the night…

Look there is a house…lonely…secluded…standing aloof on the mouth of a dense forest…as if the house is also about to be a constituent of the gigantic trees just within a matter of time…

And just peep through the wide open window to have a glance of the owner of the deserted house…

May be he is a deserted owner of a deserted house…

He has only one task to perform…

Towards the afternoon he fetches his arm-chair and places it on the open terrace…and then waits eagerly for the dark hours to delve deep into the lap of mother-nature…

He sits there…with the patience of an eternal hermit he keeps his eyes all fixed towards the pitch-black darkness…

He clearly feels a cold wave of winter breeze running through his entire fragile physic….he shakes for awhile…

And then, with a dedication more intense, he robes himself and starts to look towards the infinite starry night…

The world around him sleeps a peaceful death…a death…only to reborn again with the coming morning beams…

He sits there, and waits with his fingers crossed for the much awaited Metamorphosis…

The Metamorphosis of a human being…sober and slender…to reach to a new shape…

The man, with all his education and ethics and enigma slowly feels a deep turmoil in his own heart…

A turmoil…that some abnormal, unscrupulous passion is trying to tear him apart and trying to convert him to a new shape….

The Metamorphosis…

The man resists long…

The man resists hard…

The man does all that he could do to ignore the inevitable shape-changing-procedure….

But… alas! All in vain!

To the sheer surprise of the starry face of heaven, and the person concerned himself… the Metamorphosis takes its final flight…

An Owl pops out of his inner self…

It begins to look at the spell-bound man for some times…

And then starts to fly away…

It raises high above the dark sky…

And finally it vanishes….

The man, in complete astonishment sits back onto his arm-chair…

And waits… waits for his Owl-self to roam back to him again in the morning…

Ethereal curse has chained this one extra burden on him….

He has to release each night the Owl in him, and wait the whole dark hours till it comes back to him…

He should have to spend the nights all sleepless….

When the rest of the world should sleep…smile…or cry during their dreams…

He should have to carry the eternal Cross of the Metamorphic Process…..

He should be a man during the days…

And as the night falls, Metamorphosis should convert him to an Owl…ugly owl….to rover the lands and skies, and to explore the unknown territories of human mind and humane relationship….

This is the Metamorphosis for sure….

This is the Metamorphic Tragedy for sure…

But what else the man could do? Other than transforming into a giant owl day after day!

The Phoenix

Oh god!

Great gracious god,

Let you have some mercy on me

And let me forget all my past,

Snatch away all the memories

Dumped inside that two halves of brain,

Some full of tears, some wet with sobs…

Clear away all the junkies…

Scrape warehouse memories of ancient times,

Take away…take away every thing from me…

All…all those, the good, the bad, and ugly…

Oh God! Let me start all afresh…

With a memory…

With a life….

The memory of a new born babe

And the life of a new paraffin candle...

I would burn myself out…

Though for a little, very little span of time...

Try to illuminate the unnumbered darkness scattered everywhere…

And, at the same, store some memories of my own chosen one…

The new light would burn till it can,

The new babe would gather knowledge till it may…

Then again, both of us…

Will die and wait for another birth…

We should wait eagerly on the edge of Lethe

For some new perception...

For some new illumination…

But more than that…

May be long for another new life…

And may be some lives after life!

  

Fire On The Sky...Smoke In The Air...

It’s “Deepabali”—the Night of Light-Fire and Smoke!

All the roofs of the house-hold locality are electrifyingly decorated with Chinese lanterns…a few roofs and verandahs are definitely orthodox enough to distinguish themselves following the oldie traditional line of Deewali Celebration with some oil filled mud lamps (easily identified by “Pradip” or “Diya”); and some are most happy to just using candles of various size, colour and smell.

Fire-crackers have gladly started ransacking the little peace that was till unshattered, and with them perticipated jubilant cries of a mammoth spectators consisting of representatives from various age groups…from six to sixty, I presume!

The dark night sky could hardly bare a single patch of black on her night-robe…many known and unknown sorts of fire-crackers are showering into her some dazzling rays of light every now and then.

She could hardly get a place to be used as an exceptionally good hide-out.

The air is also not less unfortunate—it is almost chocked, and about to loose conscience; as the smoke covered air only offers an asthma even to them too who never considered themselves a victim of that fetal illness.

It’s the Deepabali Night…the festival of light.

When the sky is simply dazzling with multicoloured light I lowered my head from my one room flat…I intended to see the ground…the mud…the grass…the rocks… the thrown away garbage…and all these little trivialities.

The sky was hired by some most prosperous citizens of this society…but still, the earth surface has been occupied by a very minor group of people.

One small girl and a boy…much smaller in size were standing there. They were certainly not properly dressed, specially if you keep the sprit of the “Festive of Light” in mind!

Torn away frock…unwashed dirty shirt with stinking smell…uncombed hair…without shoes…

They do not have any special feature, by the grace of which they could be taken to the top of these multi-storied-buildings where they could join the rest of their fellow age group and have some fun-hours together.

The girl and the boy also knew that much more than we do…so they stopped at the gate, stood firmly on the earth surface….and kept their eager eyes all fixed at the night sky high above their heads….

They are in the expectation that none would kick them out before the fire-cracker-show is burnt out!

And far far miles away I can clearly visualize another little girl….she is now gorgeously dressed up and standing aloof at the corner of the roof of their three-storied-building….

It’s a vast wide open roof…

There are plenty of fire-works scattered all around…

Her grandmother and mother are preparing the candles on the arches of the roof-wall….they had already called the five-years old girl to join them and be some help.

But the girl is lost somewhere in some deep thought.

She is looking at the sky…at the distant stars that twinkle straight to her eyes…

She is looking for her father…

She knew, that her father has gone to somewhere among those stars high above the sky.

Everybody told her that he will never ever return again…

She will never be able to throw herself onto her father’s arms as soon as he would return from office….

He will never tell her beautiful stories at bed time….

He will never try to put her into sleep with the help of some lullaby…

All of them say that her father is gone…gone for ever…

But still, the little mermaid constantly keeps her eyes fixed at the stars and tries desperately to figure out which, among all these millions and billions of stars, could be her father!

She ransacks the entire sky…only with a little hope of finding her father someday….

But Alas! The smoke density in the air very soon catches her eyes with a delicate burning sensation…and tears roll out of her lovely red eyes…

The unfortunate father remains undiscovered.

Elegy...

"The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me...."

T. Gray

(Elegy Written In A Country Church-Yard)

Adieu! ...Adieu!

GERMANY: 4 - ARGENTINA: 0 

The Heart Beat ends…

The Hope ends…

The Expectation ends…

The Journey ends…

The Dream Run ends…

The Rushing Back Home ends…

The Gluing Before Television ends…

The Sleepless Night ends…

The World Cup ends…

Everything ends…!

Football is supposed to be a Team-Game; played by eleven players, each having a separate position and separate role to perform in the field…

Some are to direct the ball into the opposition net, and some are to work even harder to prevent it from entering into their own…

Its rather an unusual sight, if not ridiculous, to watch almost all the members of a supposedly Team-Game to be engaged all through the ninety minutes of the play time in one sole task of scoring a goal by himself….

Trying all sorts of things… running…dribbling…drifting…shooting from distance…chipping from close range…… attempting everything to register his own name as a goal scorer in the FIFA Record Book…

Everyone has tried every possible thing to manage a Goal-Whistle to blow for his own…but not for the Country they are playing…

Everyone has tried to execute every possible thing…but not for even a single time in all the ninety minutes of official play-time to pass the ball to one fellow team-mate who is standing nearby, all unmarked,…and in a much better position to direct the ball into the net…

May be, I am not sure, that is… sorry! that was a Team playing with ELEVEN Strikers in the field! Sorry! Ask apology again, dear Diego, at least your Goal-Keeper Romero didn’t try such hilariously selfish attempts!

Diego, poor Diego, we have seen you successfully dribbling through the entire opposition single handedly and finally channelize the lather globe rest in peace inside the opponent net in many a occasion all along your career…and that is why you still glitter gloriously among the short list of All-Time-Greats!

But your Boys should have realized that neither of them bear the title “Maradona” with their names!

Had they been realized this sad little truth that all ball-players are not necessarily be Maradonas…and there never will be any more Maradonas…our attraction for the FIFA World Cup 2010 should have been still alive!

But for now….we have to cry for you Diego…

We really have to cry for you, Argentina…

For another four long….....l-o-n-g years….