Three Poems by Zinia Mitra

However fast we think we walk
life is slow
chewing one day at a time.
It is one step after another in a slow-paced walk
through a meandering wilderness
filled with bird’s movements, their flappings and cooings.

I think it is beautiful—
how solitude drapes itself in the guise of time,
seeping through the crevices of yesterday’s forgotten rooms,
sliding like ancient roots through roofless dreams
and green doors people leave in our hearts when they go.

Waking is strange—
like surfacing from underwater visions
with night’s  flowers still blooming their petals
inside the mind’s vase,
they leave sticky notes
in the language our dreams understand.

I think it is surreal—
for as we race  home,
our yesterdays sit like spectral silhouettes
on park benches of shifting shadows, swinging their legs
wearing costumes of our lost echoes and forgotten masks.

I think it is unsettling—
that we find more comfort in the spectral remnant
of what once was—
our old sorrows, our old loves,
each a flickering ghost on our rain-soaked avenue.
We feign haste,
stepping past these remnants of time--
embracing our loneliness
we only pretend to walk fast, past them.

Footbridges arch over the city
like sleeping serpents of thought,
their spines bending under the weight
of invisible footsteps 
forgotten philosophies.

Why do I come to words
to net my fleeting truths?
Words, like candles under glass jars
flicker briefly.

Every  word—a warmth of a quilt
where I am born again in fragments,
every word a coldness of silhouettes where I die .

Events spiral open like long tongue of smoke
endings dress up like beginnings shake hands.

Does being a street artist
point to something other than what he is?
His body a question mark
dragging a rope like a long-tailed comet --
why does he whip himself
with that thick, myth-dipped rope?
Does he believe in the myths he retells
the sagas of personal sins and absolutions?

He holds on to his art
like the old footbridges hold the city
archiving its myths 
walkways
whisper them to pedestrians
who climb up the steps
walk across their length to descend
into the other side - another reality—
there buildings unfold backwards,
and nothing means what meant before.

Sometimes from the bus window
the city flickers like a hologram in sepia,
where baul songs float
like dust motes in the dying light.

Stones dressed as gods
blink sluggishly under banyan trees,
and red threads tie the air
into pulsing knots of prayers.

Sometimes I become a boat,
folding my hair into a paper sail.
I untie every thread
and watch them unravel into sky-water,
each one a human whisper,
a secret the sea learns to trill.

Shadows of trees grow legs
and cross the roads with diligence,
sometimes they nod at me,
as if I too were made of leaves.