The ancient Greeks found a breeze, a hawk flying.
I look outside the window –
An evening sky.
The trees are swaying with – no, not what I thought.
Something less profound.
The thin arm
Of the electric line skirts, just misses
The bird’s nest. Scruffy, the chicks dreaming.
Wings glide, a few trace a
Line from one to another,
An invisible sky.
Countless hours spent
In the lap
Of language. Somewhere beyond it.
They say it no longer exists.
The feeling of the air tells me it is there.
But a storm is first born in the mind.
Only then it travels
Through the eddies, the misty mountain tops
Past banyan trees, sanctuaries,
Through morning prayers, where words don’t matter
Only the refrain moves,
And makes one pause, in the middle of the journey.
And sometimes opens the shutters, where the cobwebs
Have grown dusty.
Amlanjyoti Goswami’s poems have appeared in publications in India, Nepal, the UK, Hong Kong, South Africa, Kenya and the USA, including Forty under Forty: An Anthology of Post-Globalisation Poetry (Poetrywala, 2016). He grew up in Guwahati, Assam and lives in Delhi.
