I have seen the world recede behind the trees;
the world that was for you and me —
a vibrant blue world, dotted with green,
swirls of ocean and breeze painted
by Van Gogh — A Starry Night,
and then came a tsunami
that wiped it all from site.
A fakir overnight,
as Lalan, I sing afloat in space
in an intergalactic haze of nebulae
of a world lost;
of God
Burnt and Ripped out of Mosques;
Harried out of Temples with a bovine stampede;
Shot or Sickened out of Churches with Corona.
Will you, O God, create a new world again?
Where Lalan can pace and sing
of the wonders —
A blue ocean amidst swirls of green trees
Star-dotted skies sprinkling stardust each night
Mankind will have only one God this time
And love — lot of love in their hearts
Tolerance, Harmony and Kindness
Will you, O Almighty, paint for us
a new Hopeful world?
Mitali Chakravarty’s bylines appeared in The Statesman, The Times of India, The Hindustan Times and The Pioneer in the 1980s upto 1992 and more recently online on Kitaab.org, Countercurrent, Modern Literature, Words and Worlds (Austria) and The Daily Star, Bangladesh, Harbinger Asylum Quarterly(USA). Her poetry has been published online and as part of anthologies. Some of her poetry has recently been translated to German and read in a PEN symposium. Mitali also translates from Bengali and Hindi. She has published a humorous book of essays on living in China where she spent eight years, In the Land of Dragons (2014). Currently, she is the editor of kitaab.org.
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