Grief in Silver Winter
(In loving memory of my late brother, Nilanjan Banerjee)
(With apologies to Shakespeare in the last stanza)
Grief, coated in silver winter brings up remnants of memory like patchwork clouds… I have chewed on the sweater sleeves we wore while playing football indoors. I was a child, and the wool came undone as the auburn fairy of October left… with a sigh. November, many decades later, now, and I am old and you are gone. In winter you were born, and ere some forty winters had besieged your brow, it was time for farewells. Beauty's rose has bloomed, and it is time that I, too, gather wilted flowers. A fall season burns me black and silver. Ripeness is all.
Brush and Wind
(A response to the prompt “Lostness” by Ampat Koshy Sir)
Will dream of the brush and wind. I paint an answer in running water trying to find myself in your lostness. Have I lost you forever? Or may I still seek, and hope to find a watercolor trace of the love I crave? If I told you of the primordial fire that I lit with your cigarette, will you believe? I bathe in the valley of brush and wind to quench a fierce thirst and drench my silk-skin. Will you come? Is the water cold enough for us both to lose ourselves in?
