2 poems: Sreelekha Chatterjee

 Sreelekha Chatterjee’s poems have appeared in Verse-Virtual, Rough Diamond Poetry, The Candyman’s Trumpet, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Ballerini Book Press, The Wise Owl, among others. Nominated for Best of the Net, her poems have been widely published in more than sixty journals, magazines, and anthologies globally across fifteen countries. She lives in New Delhi, India.

Verification of Belonging

Sreelekha Chatterjee

The identity question hangs as if a hand on me is laid.

A fragile bloom born of the black plum branch,

I say to an enquiring bee so long riveted

to my honey, suddenly doubts my name proclaimed.

The sunlight’s radiant gleam, the zephyr’s chime,

the psithurism that lulled me to sleep—

all my possessions, my eternal things, abruptly

carry the air of a distant country I have never seen.

He probes my citizenship in the tree

I call home ever since my senses know.

What’s the proof I haven’t arrived

on the wind’s sudden caprice?

Or drifted from the neighboring tree

upon a passing gale?

How did my roots find this land?

How did my grip upon the branch willed my stay?

Had I known, I would have curated

an herbarium of my blood,

pressing every name of the roots that anchored me,

leaf by leaf into a permanent ledger of long line.

Perpetually lost I am in the art of becoming,

the way life makes pulses beat—from a bud

tightly held to a flower’s tender vulnerability,

and now ripening to a fruit at maturity.

My name is too wild for the honeybee’s tongue,

stumbles and calls me by my mother’s breath,

but strips away the self I maintain.

Simians, native of distant stars, hoot from afar.

I fear the gravity of the earth

weighing me down, as I weep to fall on the soil

that knows me, yet knows me not.

Shifting Desires

Sreelekha Chatterjee

In a world where torrents of desire—

infinite and unmeasured—

sweep us off our feet,

I lie indolently, lolling about the greensward—

half-asleep, uninformed.

Their alien flowers prod my awakening—

tactile yet intangible to my senses—

their textures, sensation, and touch whelm

my consciousness; the tide all-consuming, fiery.

A deep sense of obligation resumes

when my soul awaits knowledge and guidance.

But a veil remains drawn over such misery,

my desires float like glowing fireflies in the dark.

The anguish of such moments descends

to the living fictitious appearance

that my blooming ingenuity ever portrays.

My immediate vicinity to the troubled sea weighs heavily,

as inquietude permeates inwards with an outlandish distress

only to discover the physiognomy of my days

has changed, garlanded uncertainty.

My only consolation is my forbearance—

the voice and countenance lost—

of my elevated nature, knowing they’ll soon reappear

although in altered forms,

the monumental preferences enriched by my aspirations.