by Joe Winter | Feb 24, 2020 | Lalon Fakir at the Kolkata Book Fair, Poems
Lalon Fakir at the Kolkata Book Fair Lalon, Lalon, how did it happen?One minute I’m treading the dust-grit of 2006in its sky-grime and car-crush and frantic alleywaysand not even the next, my friend, we are on a pathbetween two villages, and you are singing What is...
by Joe Winter | Feb 24, 2020 | Lalon Fakir at the Kolkata Book Fair, Poems
To My Mother I do not know now if you sang to me in the first grace of days, but there’s a sound still at my sleeping side, that rang to me down boyhood’s cavern. You were not around and nothing of the heart was to be found. But there was something deep and dear to...
by Joe Winter | Feb 24, 2020 | Lalon Fakir at the Kolkata Book Fair, Poems
Tree for Subal Chandra Mandal Set in a struggling, straggling wilderness, and instinct with a flowering, towering wood such as to reach the heavens, and shelter Earth, a young tree stood. The boy had heeded an unlettered father and learnt; the youth was apt to...
by Joe Winter | Feb 24, 2020 | Lalon Fakir at the Kolkata Book Fair, Poems
To Tell Youfor Kakoli and DevadattaI would tell you of a journey, if I can,up to creation. Night and day were out,the air itself was home, I heard a speechlighter than our loud breath, deeper than darkness,softer than shade, insistent as a new sun,wiser than words. It...
by Joe Winter | Feb 24, 2020 | Lalon Fakir at the Kolkata Book Fair, Poems
To P. Lal on his Birthday translator of the Mahabharata Past the foothills, to the battle-plain we struggled. All about us lay – no change. Our gift to you, now, is to see again the timeless in the vista of the strange, to use the vision that your readings gain:...
by Joe Winter | Feb 24, 2020 | Lalon Fakir at the Kolkata Book Fair, Poems
Ashrama for Trina Purohit Roy I have come home. The children play and learn, the garden wakes each instant in the sun. It is an ashram to which I return, a house of new awareness is begun. I have come home. There is a musical phrase implicit in the breath of evening’s...
