Three Poems by Sonnet Mondal

 

The Bridge at Midnight

The city bridge has survived another day.

Its throbbing iron rails, the shops nearby 

and the traffic do not fit it anymore tonight.

A few signposts and streetlamps 

imbibe the ambient literature 

like babies in a womb

unaware of their own existence.

As the roads stretch to sleep,

a horse cart trots over the bridge

carrying the confessions of the day. 

The Biscuit Factory

The biscuit factory 

still bears a baked aroma

on its unwrapped metal. 

The leftovers are soil now

but it failed to engulf its breath.

The blurred slogans on its walls

are old bruises—still longing to heal.

It feeds on time to shed its colour

for the bricks to appear—

the way a tree longs to shed its leaves

without our staring.

The Trident and the Tea Seller

The trident lightning arrestor

looks more constant than before—

besieged by discomfort,

bygone joys and pain—a belief

flowing endlessly into the future.

The creepers cannot

offer love to it—no red or yellow flowers.

The tea seller beside the closed factory

never noticed it since the trident

didn’t ever arrest or spear any lightning

especially when the radical flags

were offering a yearlong monsoon

to a sneaking, venomous rust.

There is now a vacuum inside the gates,

patches of love and strife on the trident

and outside some tea for passers-by.

___

Sonnet Mondal writes from Kolkata and is the director of Chair Poetry Evenings – Kolkata’s International Poetry Festival. His ten books of poetry include Clamour for a Handful of Rice (Copper Coin), An Afternoon in My Mind (Copper Coin), and Lautati Dopaharein (Rajkamal Prakashan). He has read as an invited poet at literary festivals in more than thirty countries, and his works have been translated into over twenty languages. His recent works have appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Virginia Quarterly, Stand magazine, Versopolis, and The Markaz Review. His honours include an Award of Honour from the Chandigarh Sahitya Akademi and the Gayatri Gamarsh Memorial Award. He was a part of the Silk Routes Project, IWP IOWA, and a guest writer-in-residence at the Almaty Writing Residency. He is the managing editor of Verseville, editor of the Indian section of Lyrikline, and has served as a guest editor for Words Without Borders. He can be found on IG @sonnet_mondal