Love Poem to a Sweetheart
Srinjay Chakravarti
Your questions float in the air
of the embargoed room, nebulae
in the dark night of my trespass.
"What do I do?
How do I make my living?"
I work nights
walking on air,
harvesting galaxies
with a sickle moon.
Yesterday, near the collapsar
at Andromeda, I met
a girl with a golden silhouette.
In the shadow she cast
on the trapeze of silver gossamer,
I could see a white hole
where her heart should have been.
I could see right through it
to the other end of the universe.
I asked her, sotto voce,
"Where do you come from,
and where do you go?"
She gave no reply,
only pointed a finger
at the Milky Way
and turned into a river
flowing with sand.
Now I was standing in a desert
twilight, the turquoise silence
of countless candles.
She had become the stars
in the black sky of my eyes.
[This poem was first published in Zone Magazine (Argentina)]
Srinjay Chakravarti is a journalist, economist, writer and translator based in Salt Lake City, Calcutta, India, who was educated at St. Xavier's College, Calcutta and at universities based in Calcutta and New Delhi. His poetry and prose have
appeared in publications in nearly 30 countries including Eclectica,
ThePedestal, The Foliate Oak, Avatar Review, Voices Israel, Otherland and
Ginosko. He won one of the top prizes in the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial
Poetry Competition 2007-08. The Continental Review recently published a
video recording of Srinjay reading his poetry: www.thecontinentalreview.com.