Amit Shankar Saha’s Two Poems

Amit Shankar Saha is a seasoned poet. He writes with a sensitivity and a craft that conveys emotion and meaning in a way that it lingers in the mind post reading. He writes on myriad themes …  love, loss, nostalgia, memory, art of writing poetry, to name a few. His poetic devices aptly transform the abstract into images in the mind, pull at heart strings and artistically convey the deep emotion and thoughts of the poet. His poems weave the personal with the political, in poems like ‘Judah’ where he refers to lover and beloved as ‘Russia’ and ‘Ukraine’.

Poems:

1. The Flavour of Missing

At the end of the day

when I am on a train

I try to write a poem

about our missed meeting.

When I look out into the dark

I think

How beautiful is the dark

because in the dark I can

imagine that you are there

just that I can’t see you.

As if the dark fields beyond

the train window are dark

because I miss you.

I know how the space of missing

gets stretched when the train takes me far.

And this keeps us alive for the future.

 2. Judah

What if April is the cruellest month,

like you said quoting the poet?

How cruel can it be?

Maybe this month a country

will be wiped out like Judah

when the Babylonians came.

Maybe the tragedy will not be

the decimation of a kingdom

but the separation of two people.

If love is the victim,

exile is the cruelty.

How many Aprils you need?

Why blame a month? Just

a day, a moment is enough

to be the cruellest?

Maybe memory is Babylon,

desire a dead land with dull roots,

lilacs my fingers,

your hand the spring rain.

Maybe April is the cruellest month

if you are Russia and I Ukraine.

Bio Note:

Amit Shankar Saha is the author of three collections of poems titled Balconies of Time, Fugitive Words and Illicit Poems. His poems have appeared in The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2020 and 2021, The Best Indian Poetry 2018 and Converse: Contemporary English Poetry by Indians. He has won numerous awards and is also a Pushcart Prize, Griffin Poetry Prize, and Best of Net nominee. He has a PhD in English from Calcutta University and teaches in the English Department at Seacom Skills University. He is the Editor-in-Chief of EKL Review and the Assistant Secretary of the Intercultural Poetry and Performance Library (IPPL). His latest book is a collection of non-fiction titled A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Essayist. His website is www.amitshankarsaha.com