The air has cleared today,
Over the city, and in my head,
I see the trees breathe
The invisible greenness of air,
I feel the taste of sunlight
On my hungry face,
I don’t remember the day
I was born,
But I will remember this day,
When the air cleared,
After days of foggy thoughts,
A bastard of a week,
“Time is a fucking bastard”
Wrote Carlos Fuentes,
And he was right, not people,
Time is the bastard,
It is always looking to
Tear us off from everything,
From days of love,
Nights of bitter forgetting,
From faces
We were scared to touch,
Time, the bastard,
Scared us of consequences,
And we, with memories
Of defeated shadows,
We gave in, we failed to bring
Our hands of blood
To warm a face,
And it lingered, it lingers
With our steps, on roads Amichai
Called, “dark, flowing love”
We walk over them
Carrying the dead over our
Shoulders,
We hide the sun in our back,
We who crushed
Many moons in our palms,
We become plotters
Of time, we plot against
Our defeats, naming others
For our neurosis,
Once upon a time, the bastard
Had a face and a name,
Of a god, lying on the amorous
Bed of a cobra, its hood
An umbrella of panoptic gaze,
Time kept guard on itself,
Love, watched by serpentine
Eyes, love is never alone,
Never allowed to be alone on earth
Or heaven, fruit or no fruit,
Tree or no tree, love was fated
To face vigil, its nakedness
Under the scrutiny of mirrors,
We only feign having eyes,
Blind children of time,
We don’t see the way we wait
For the one we love,
And those who do not see,
Do not welcome,
We do not welcome another
By Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee