Grassy Days and Nights

This city will never see the birth of a forest.
I am sitting baffled keeping the picture in front
that you painted on a ruled sheet of paper
with your first blood chants.


How should I stay like grass without being a lover?
How would I press a soft pillow? How would I
drill in wild rock notes into my brain and ears?
Cigarettes would burn out with dreams, existence and solitude,
At one go all will die and sleep down in my guts
without protest.


This is the only bit of memory and rest of the fragments
the loves between the arteries and veins
the glory of the foliage have disappeared,
or everything fell off, rotten and putrid
those sunny days those softness of the little warmth.
I hid the water and those few days which I found by chance.
I have nailed those on my breast in fear of losing them,
And this city, the city’s wrong doing and
rehearsals of life and all those shades and shadows,
our pretension to live.


This city will never see the birth of a forest.
Probably it was born like a day stuck
to a finger like the fragments of a dream
the inevitability of a long sleep
which had no beginning and end.
Life surely will hunt you down one day.


Subhankar Das

The Streets, The Bubbles Of Grass # Reviews

The Streets, The Bubbles Of Grass by Subhankar Das

The Orange Spotlight: Subhankar Das
jason - Posted on 15 December 2010
WHAT TO WEAR DURING AN ORANGE ALERT?

“No routes are left open except to swell the ranks”

Receiving and reading through this collection has been an advanced exercise in the importance of experiencing and understanding other cultures. It is vital to reach out beyond your basic circle, beyond your state, beyond your situation, and beyond your country to discover what you are missing. It may be a buzz phrase, but it is important to be culturally aware. Subhankar Das has been an advocate for and thriving member of the Bangla poetry scene in India since the late eighties. To my eyes, his words are fresh and urgent, foreign but familiar, and an education in culture with every line.

In his latest collection, The Streets, The Bubbles Of Grass, Subhankar uses his craft to all at once subdue and insight. He conjures up images of street life, of nature, of a life filled with living and dying for the word and what it represents. The collection is both personal and universal. I feel this is most clear in the poem “Distance”.

“My wings. Wings. My wings. Because there is fire in the wings- the bones of the featherless wings are flying in the wind. Just now, they would lie on this paper. Side by side. My wings, my bones, my hair.”

The piece begins with this line “Does not matter whether it Subhankar or no Subhankar. Carrying my own corpse like this.” For me it does matter, and I am thankful that Subhankar has traveled this distance and his papers and thoughts and troubles and dreams have landed on my desk.





Dye Hard Press Review
POSTED BY GARY CUMMISKEY


The Streets, The Bubbles of Grass is the latest collection of poems by Subhankar Das and is published by Graffiti Kolkata.
While Das may have abandoned the Burroughsian cut-up techniques of his earlier work and embraced an indigenous approach to language - turning more to the influence of Jibanananda Das - there is still an unmistakable post-modernist approach at play, whether in prose poems such as That Boy, Old Rust and Sailor's Song, the mixed forms of City Blues, or the longer verse works such as A Little More Than The River Khorkai.

As Santanu Roy writes: 'Subhankar's style departs from the conventional wisdom of poetry and anti-poetry. All such margins are being challenged and the reader is finally led to the magic stairs of open text.'

Fire Water

Check out my poem which is now up at The Camel Saloon