Sitting By The Tandoor Poem by jewel mazhar

Look! Otto Hahn’s iron-peacocks
Float
On Heraclitus’s river;
In the morning restaurants, see
how tonnes of wheat
Puff up in sun’s tandoor
Clouds, translucent and white,
drift across the moon
And, in his own cornfield,
Binay Majumdar stoops.


I remembered him
When the pines were tossing
their heads as if in
Self-resentment; leaves falling
aimlessly and
The strange, possessed,
machine coughing all day!


Cards of different suits wafting on
the air
Our blood-o-polis brims with
peasant-traps;
And the poet waits in front of an
alighted gas-burner


Oh, Silvia Plath! You burned
yourself like glass!
—Quandary swayed!



Those that have come past many
a traffic light,
Which of the faces do you wear?
Who among you propagate the
greased corns and who was it
That put his own wings to fire?
Now wait and see what comes
out of the tandoor,
To whom our daily bread rolls!


[Translated from the original Bengali by fellow poet and friend Subrata Augustine Gomes]