Two Poems by Susmita Bhowmick

 Where Thought Learns to Breathe:-

The Brain loved numbers,
kept stars in straight lines,
believed every fall could be measured.
The Heart believed in gravity—
how some things pull you
without permission.
They quarreled like weather and time,
one forecasting storms,
the other choosing to dance in rain.
Maps lay torn between them,
roads arguing with rivers.
The Brain built walls of caution,
brick by careful brick.
The Heart grew windows in those walls,
letting light bleed in.
They traveled different worlds
within the same fragile body—
one anchoring,
one drifting,
both pretending they could sail alone.
But a lighthouse means nothing without the sea,
and a tide dies without the moon.
When one grew silent,
the other forgot how to speak.
So they return, again and again—
not to agree,
but to survive.
For love like theirs is not harmony;
it is the quiet knowledge
that apart they function,
but together they live.

 What Remains:-

 

We spend our lives wondering—
who stayed,
who left,
who loved us enough to remain,
and who quietly became a memory.
Tell me,
how long does it take
to leave the one you loved beyond reason?

Days?
Years?
Or does a part of us never leave at all,
remaining behind
in the spaces they once occupied?
I do not know
whether I walked away
or whether I was the one left behind.
I only know
I asked for so little—
not forever,
not impossible promises,
only the simple grace
of being chosen
again and again.
Yet people leave.
Not always because love ends,
but because staying does.
And in the end,
what remains of us?
Not the conversations,
not the reasons,
not even the goodbye.
Only fragments—
a voice that still visits silence,
a name that still trembles in the heart,
a feeling that survives its owner.
Perhaps that is the tragedy of love:
we never truly lose people.
They continue living within us,
long after they have stopped
living beside us.