On the lips of my shadow
By Braja K Sorkar
Echoes from the Rooftop of Ancient house.
​
Born in the dark before my breath began,
With no companion in the empty space,
He wept to see the making of a man,
The day I stepped into this mortal place.
​
No friendly faces gathered at the gate;
My shadow walked the path ahead of me.
They watch his stride and leave me to my fate,
As if I were a ghost they could not see.
​
He roams all day, then stays beside my heart,
When evening falls upon this weary place.
Within the roof I locked a shard of light,
Trapped in a lonely room for empty years.
Through Shravan’s rain I stayed outside of sight,
With dripping leaves and unremembered tears.
Now Bhadra’s burning sun begins to glow,
I climb the stairs to see what blossoms grow.
Braja K Sorkar is an award-winning bilingual author, poet, editor, and translator [2021] working in Bengali and English. He has published ten titles, including the acclaimed collection Syllables of Broken Silence (2021), which earned him the Indology Award. Sorkar edits the long-running Bengali magazine Tristoop (since 2001) and the Durgapur Review (since 2023). An eminent multilingual translator associated with India’s Sahitya Akademi, his own poetry is translated into Chinese, Spanish, Hindi, and Manipuri. His poetry has been included in several poetry anthologies in India and abroad.