Inside the cemetery 

Amanita Sen is a poet who stands out because of her sensitive, lucid and free flowing verses. She has been on the literary scene for more than a decade, shining steadily like a pole star. Her verses make the commonplace and negligible special, meaningful and aesthetic by the touch of her poetic wand! Her poetic mind seeks out beauty, love and truth in the ordinary and commonplace such as a cemetery, weeds, a fading light etc.

Author of two volumes of poetry “Candle in my dreams”, “What I don’t tell you”, Amanita Sen is a mental health professional living in Kolkata. Her poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies. She has written the scripts for 3 short films that have been shown in Kolkata Film festival and one was adjudged the best short film in a festival held in Agra. An audio venture produced by Times Music has included some of her poems. The meets organized by the Amaravati Poetic prism at Vijawada, the Pulara Festival in Malaysia, the World poetry festival in Bhubaneswar, the World thinkers and writers’ peace meet held by ISISAR Kolkata are few of the conferences she has attended from 2014 to 2019. Music and voice-plays are her areas of interest.

Inside the cemetery 

In a city starving of corners to love,

they step inside a sleeping cemetery

where lovers make out quietly.

No one ignores like the dead man

does, the stories of the secret highs

and lows of this mortal play on earth.

They feel a strong kinship with the tree

whose top is lost to the last storm.

Brokenness holds for them a familiar charm.

They choose the dead leaves to step on.

The softness feels right on their tired feet,

as if the leaves know of their limbs’ history

of aches and cuts, like the way death

knows about the life-chapters inside out.

As darkness descends, they fade into

the city lights, hearing the leaves whisper

to the selves they left within the walls to rest.

They are sometimes seen walking inside,

the moonlight attests.

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