Nandita Samanta’s Two Poems

Nandita Samanta is an artist who creates images with words induced with silences, sounds, emotions and colours. The artist in her, paints pictures that dissolve the boundary between poem and painting. In “The Gravity of art” she beautifully concretizes the abstract concept of gravity as an ‘adhesive’ that the painter in the poem uses to stick rocks together. She compares the patience of the artist and the image of rocks balanced over one another, to a saint unaffected by his surroundings. She claims that art ‘overcomes death’ i.e. lives on even after its creator is gone. Samanta versifies myriad emotions, poem ‘Unsent’ is a take on the modern-day love where the lover/beloved sits with a phone, texting and deleting messages probably unsure and skeptical of the response it would garner.

1. Unsent

In the shifting sands of quandary

and another glass of my favourite wine

with a tempting smile

at the edge of all silences,

in the wait of light years

in countless thoughts

you remain-

in many unsent messages.

2. THE GRAVITY ART

There are artists who balance rocks.

One rock over another rock using gravity as the adhesive.

The precision and patience are meditative.

In this oneness of nature and art there’s a visible stability.

In the dust, in silence, the monochrome landscape,

similar to a grave, overcomes death.

Against the soft vibrations of wind,

rocks stand perpendicular to the land in a saintly posture.

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