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Sunday, May 16, 2010

Boatsman


(Please note that I have tried to build the innocence that accompanies a child's perception and therefore have tried to keep the poem as crude as possible. Read it, thinking a small girl was telling you the whole and not me.)
A song on his lips,
A bare figure,
A smile of he lips,
The sound of the oars,
"Boats man, which way
Do you go?"

As he slowly
Turn into a speck
Over that river bend...
I wonder about his
name...
On days
when the world is bright
I think him
To be another
Helper of God...
Who fixes
The bonds
Of estranged mortals,
With smile on his face.

On days
When the wind is high
When the horizon is dark
When it seems
That the rain god
Is out to
ruin my world...
I think him to be
a brother of Charon
Who ferries
People to the lair
Lord Death.

(Though the image carries a meaning of its own and is yet again provided by Aritra Chatterjee, I took my own liberty and wrote something distinctly different. It is tale once told to me by a little girl, who believed in the stories of Demons and Gods. Here I tried to pay tribute to that friend, I did lose in the journey called life. As a child, I remember playing with her, But I don't recall her name...may be she was our maid's daughter, or the daughter of our neighbor's maid...no I remember nothing of it. All I recall was the strange perception she harbored of her homeland, and of the river and of the many boats men she got to see, while playing along with friends of her age, on the gullible river banks. )

3 comments:

Lazy Pineapple said...

a lovely poem...but the hint a Charon made a bit eerie...

I love the way you can look at a photo and create a poem...really needs a lot of talent :)

wanderer said...

@lazy pineapple

Well, that is what the little friend told me..."It seems like he(the boats man) is a relative of the man to takes the souls of hell (in bengali we call it paatal/underworld)...so I named the person as a brother of Charon.

Sayak Shome said...

It amazes me how you can think like a child. Few grown ups can do so.