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