‘The trees grow at night / as a man’s life shortens in the dark’: Assamese poems of displacement

Monihari Bazaar

(a stationery market)

A giant snake loops through my mind
this game of feeling versus thought
is now at its fag end

If you keep playing the game, a dying flame
of meaning and nothingness
you might earn a chance to climb the ladder

For a foot soldier like me
the ladder is always out of reach
Still, I take a chance,
gazing at the ladder

A snake slithers in front of my mind –
someone pull me out of this loop

Or the snake will …
Or I will …

Slip past the serpent,
climb the ladder,
there’s the Monihari Bazaar

We go to hell

The living pray for the living

Treading over light
they dig graves for the dead

“God drives them mad before they die.”

Those with nothing but a handful of tears
are lined up and stitched with lead bullets

Let the slain be immortal
let the slayers be immortal

Let massacres be eternal
let the king’s decree be eternal

And we
living with our backs to the sun

We go to hell

Kohima

Upon your green spine,y
ou have let loose
a long lock of shadows.

The notes of the piano
knit a soft mist
in my blue teacup.

The mist and I
tumble from the tip of your breast

to yet another emerald frontier

With a Dream

While playing with a dream
the green waves of the mountains drew near

Beneath the teak trees
a serpent path slithered towards the stream

As I walked along the road
draping the green waves around me

the shadows of the teak trees followed close

I screamed
and all the leaves of the teak trees fell

the serpent path tightened around me
surging like a red river from the mountains

Human flowers bloom only in dreams

The trees grow at night
as a man’s life shortens in...

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