The Final Smooch and other poems by Moumita Alam

Let's Give Birth to a New Day
I feel like kissing you
for the next thousand years.
Rivers are drying on our beds
The moss is turning into straw
The eyes of the dead fish are
Grazing from the stagnant ponds
The frogs are floating with their bellies
Flipped over on the fermented foam.
The half-burnt ravens are returning to land
On the roasted anthills.
The scorched forests are smelling of charred bones.
The worm-eaten feathers of the bluebirds are falling
From the dark sky.
Time has been frozen inside the sooty
round globe of the clock.
It's sneezing with third-grade pneumonia.
The seas have turned into cold stones.
The egrets are on their last flights.
In the shadow of this eclipse
I'm waiting for you
Let's make love.
Somewhere a crow is still cawing
It has mistaken the gloomy night as dawn
It's flapping its wings and thawing the snow
On its talons.
Let's make love sweetheart
The eggs are still warm in me
And your love is still fresh
Let's crawl into each other's skin.
In a distant village
A bell keeps tolling
Let's give birth to a new day.

On The Killing of My Tree
When the news of her killing arrived
I was walking down the village path
I didn't pause
Rather I ran fast
Like an escapist or a man
Whose house is burning behind
And he is running from the horrid visual.
How it feels to be homeless
Or to lose home one more time!
The keeper of my innumerable echoes
and the bruised memories of my childhood all
fell once again in the hands of the monsters:
We call them men.
I often wonder why after every meeting
A blister used to erupt on her skin!
It soaked my pain every time:
when I first realized I am a girl
and my childhood uncle loves to
play with the bud inside of my
flower printed panty
and my father is nothing but another predator
of another home
or my mom is a crying immovable utensil
or my first crush on that hippie boy
is the love I have lost forever
or my return from the marriage - the cage is not
a return actually.
The day my grandmother left
the shrunken folds of her skin:
the warm bag of my comfort
had become dead cold forever
and I rushed to hug my tree.
that day under her skin I saw
a caterpillar with many eggs.
Now it has gone forever
and left behind a cavernous wound.
The weather clock reports:
No Monsoon. No winter. No Spring
this year.
And the woodcutter's beak has turned
into a human appendage.

The Final Smooch
Two bluish tongues are in the deepest cave
transcending evanescence in melting layers
of the untouched indifference of ages.
In the mating of the sun with his lost planet
the rushing adrenaline is merely
a watcher in the thickness of the
red glued orchids.
Time has changed
the poplars by the roadside have
turned from infant green to dark green
to red and then fiery brown.
Teesta has become pregnant again
the algae have grown in open eyelids
the breasts have become the earth's timeclock
the quartz of their secretion has turned into
a moon on dark nights.
And the two tongues are
still going deep into each other,
the only hurdle before the earth's collapse
into a black manhole.

Where Do all the Frogs Go?
The midnight moanings,
the creak creak of an old rusty
wooden cot,
and the croakings of the he-frogs for the
she-frogs -
We have lost all in our jobless pursuit
and greed.
The  empty stomachs are listless to the
early morning's pleasure now
The cot has lost its skeleton
The frogs are all dead
The rains are breeding pesticides
In a basti of a megacity
Still, the door is wide open
Zamila's tired eyes are drooping
No customer is visiting these days
Her mother is turning her eyes away from the sky
A patch of dark cloud is hovering in her bosom.
Moumita Alam is a poet and essayist hailing from the northern part of West Bengal who writes poetry in both Bengali and English. Her poetry collection The Musings of the Dark was published in 2020. She also writes for the Bengali daily newspaper Uttarbanga Sambad.