Papiya Lahiri
Time Keeper
By not keeping time almost always
Have managed to keep it
By not disrupting events and letting it flow
Have managed to keep things from falling apart
How is it done?
Can find answers only in hindsight
Where the golden rule is to be patient
To avoid regrets, quickly formulated and without much thought
Rash and spontaneous
What is it that keeps me from trying the same trick?
Something undiscernible about my own behavior, is it?
I can keep time very well
So I thought
What good is keeping time when you lose the people you are keeping it for?
Life happens erratically
You happen to be at the exact same time at a place where you needed to be
Only because you either got late or was there in advance
Who was keeping time then?…so precisely to be true
So mathematically correct
There’s someone else keeping time for us
For all the errors and our false vanity
For the big shot that we think we are
There is another time keeper, in another dimension and frequency
That can’t be read by us
Because we don’t know how it works
Perhaps, it operates with faith deeper and fuller and truer
Understood amidst accidents, after making a mess
Requires a more humane ‘us with ourselves’
So the equation changes with others
Taking action and changing the course of our lives
Isn’t it in our hands then?
What if nothing at all comes out of being patient and doing nothing
Except the pile of calendar years heaped one over the other
Getting answers from everywhere and still nowhere your heart clings to
What is it that you truly want?
A life spent exactly like this
or is it something beyond
Logic Defied
The more I try to move away, the harder I am pulled in
So persuasive and bold
nothing could hold back
The more logically I tend to solve it
More love I feel
The solution is not in its finality
Because there is none to find
Causing pain and stress
trying to do the undo-able
What to ask
Through a Q/A mode
It’s not simple
Could be only felt
And spelt internally
Legends of Tomorrow are a Misfit Today
Those tiny crevices of leaking dreams
giving birth to an ingenious embryotic idea
hibernating in utter silence
Erupting all of a sudden with great gusto and momentous clarity
Into one whole with doubts lurking behind every face seeing a face
And people knowing it all in another billowing wave trying
to suck in the madcap
But madcap as the name is
Won’t nudge towards that appearance
As if lost in a wonderland so beautiful to be true
Relishes in an inner worldly ‘fancy’ of no origin
Until that world starts spreading its perfume so pleasant
That everyone seems to have a whiff
And know more about it
By now the dates have changed
And no more living is the madcap
Yet uniting with the universal reality of today!
Legroom for Fairy Tales
When the laughter sounded different
The un-touched tea cup, full to the brim
Tears trickled from an unseen
Faucet of unfinished dreams
Touching the smiling cheek
At the thought of failing someone
Standing on a ground that’s solid and high,
The shades of red and orange turning blue and green
Where is the adventure now?
… the charm and the gusto
The dawdling desire…
makes a legroom for fairy tales!
Leaky Pen
Constantly life oozing out from a point of no return
In the backyard of a lonely mind
A wandering figure moves around
In the shadowy patches of overgrown mossy, conceptual entrails
Of ever selfish evolving world, dwelling in dualities
With traces of sweet honey
Dropping from the innocent
Smiles of a face watching a face
In the midst of a busy day
Where stopping by requires
Reciprocating a friendly approach
Papiya Lahiri is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and modern European Languages, University of Allahabad, Prayagraj, India.
Lahiri has directed and conceptualized Indian and European plays including those of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Tagore, Ibsen and Tennessee Williams.
She has authored a book on Canadian drama and theatre, entitled Sharon Pollock the Playwright: The Personal and the Political Ordeal (2017). Her latest poetry anthology is entitled Seeds of Time (2018).
