Poems by Subhransu Maitra

TATIYA TOPI’S LETTER (1857) DISCOVERED IN AN ARCHIVE 

It seems odd, unlikely, even wrong 

that a seismic letter, one hundred seventy years old, 

written to subedars, sardars, sepoys in princely states  

before the fuse was lit,   

urging subterranean, tectonic shift prior to 

volcanic action--  

a letter long overlaid with later accretions, 

outstripped by later events 

in brutality, butchery, savagery 

and hollowed out by Partition,  

should, even now, hurt into motion

in an old waif, witness to mockery of circumstance,  

jaded curiosity, recover  

the lost sense of restless wonder  

and inflict a bruising sense of the agony  

of history being forged.

   

HOMAGE TO FOREMOTHERS FROM CLUMSY INHERITOR

 

After sixty years of tropic satire 

on almost all that man is, 

after sixty years of wallowing through unpurged history,  

a restless old wraith-also an unenchanted waif

for long years in the familiar, inexhaustible, 

labyrinth of delinquent, crucible city streets, 

seeks sanctuary, renewal, re-enchantment too, 

in the spacious contraries 

of nineteenth century Bengal.  

He traces his messy middle-class pilgrimage,  

anxious for rain for the roots,  

to the healing, verdant, often interior history 

of sunlit, transfiguring, warrior foremothers, 

progenitors, enunciators, interlocutors  

who were born, bloomed, lit up and  

altered the bruising gendered terrain  

in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

He has had more than his share of casual  

masquerading like a headless torso--enough  

to go down at last on his knees to  

these flesh-and-blood, many-handed Shakti  

deities, to praise their lovely flicker of life  

and ripple of song. 

When he thinks of them, 

he is reminded of the wayside  

patience, forbearance, endurance trees  

who suckle, nurse, rear the  

progenitor, enactor, inheritor city.