Two Poems by Ketaki Dutta

Back from Coma

Peregrinations on a plane called Earth,

Like the parachute, alighting on a dry land,

With all dreams cocooned in its womb;

Brought a wide smile on her face!

At least she could win the battle of existence,

Slipping off the main charter of diurnal reality,

Mixing up day and night in a beaker,

Stopping all conjectures and all snigger,

Jumping up from her comatose state

To be reinstated in the cycle of Life,

As a lost planet leaping up to its orbit

it was chucked out from,

Long, long ago.

 

Promises made to be Broken

 

Reason and unreason lay strewn on her way,

She waded gingerly through the clutter,

She cocked a snook at her foe,

She took her pal in a bear-hug,

She could not make out whether

To walk along the undulated way

Of unsure choices, not many,

Though held out to her in a platter!

She hesitated, she swooned,

She erased her presence off the

Map of being and nothingness,

Yet she came, breaking a promise

Of not coming back at all!

 

 Dr. Ketaki Datta is an Associate Professor of English, Bidhannagar College[Govt], Kolkata. She is a novelist, short story writer, critic and a translator. Her debut novel “A Bird Alone” has won rave reviews in India and abroad. Her poems have been published in anthologies published by Brian Wrixon, Canada and in Pangolin Review, books edited by Padmaja Iyengar and P. Gopichand and P. Nagasuseela. Her second novel “ One Year for Mourning” has been acclaimed, here and abroad. Sahitya Akademi has assigned her with the translation of “Dhruboputra”, a Sahitya Award winning Bengali novel by Amar Mitra , lately. She has a book of poems , “ Across the Blue Horizon” [Feedaread Publishers, UK, 2014].Her translations of short stories have been included in several national and international anthologies.