A Poem by Sumana Roy with illustration from Subarnarekha Pal

Looking at Hill Cart Road from Google Earth

This is the truth we avoid until our death –

that love causes anxiety, sunburns and squints,

even as we feel rustled by its antique energy.

I do not know why I want to see Hill Cart Road

from the sky – as if air gives things more grace!

As if only lightness was art, a loss of legs –

the reason why statues can’t walk or dance (or squat).

Hill Cart Road, Jorebungalow, Sukiapokhri, Darjeeling –

the names drag, like limbs of a clock on crutches.

On my laptop screen is a forest – green pimples,

trees standing, as if in a choir;

silent, like snow eating soil.

Not a single man, no haughtiness of looking.

I wonder what it is that I miss –

the tenderness of dimension;

background sound, biting consciousness;

the jealousy of light, its desire to conquer?

 

There’s too much knowledge here,

as there is in photographs –

everything’s too awake,

like time, always sleepless.

I’m scared that I’ll never get lost here.

I miss the unknowable,

its scruffiness that keeps life’s shyness alive.

The arrogance of information,

the deafness of addresses,

the pomposity of the aerial image …

I run, out of breath, without stanzas,

just relieved, to return to doubt.

 

 

Sumana Roy is the author of How I became a Tree, a work of nonfiction, Missing: A Novel, Out of Syllabus: Poems and My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories, a collection of short stories.

 

 

 

Subarnarekha Pal is an independent thinker and enthusiast and jams poetry with her friend. Amidst everything, she struggles to be an artist.