Indian Summer | Lopa Banerjee

If some day, I could weep the furnished warmth of your tears,
If some day, my own tears could speak with yours,
Radiant blue, opaque, like the tinsel-hued shore of our childhood days.
If our furtive, emaciated tears could meet in dusty, forsaken doorways,
Ripple and flow, kicked off by the dust of melancholy melodies.
If some day, our tears meet in a wind-drifting trail, lead us
Through mossy courtyards, bumpy, narrow alleys, barking dogs
Stumbling over the curb to the shoreline of our last summer days,

If some day, our tears meet and run over the mirror lake
Dissolve in it in a myth of tenderness, in a high tide night,
The world around us, dark, clingy, tossed with the
Dead wind of our palms, our tears running away
From the narrow strip of the human landscape.
 
I would have made myself at home with your tears,
Be the child again, bursting wide, plundering your open wounds
With my very own, run over with you, hand in hand
Stumbling over random houses,
Crickets, the chocolate brown of our sweat,
Where we had once tripped, in the dark.

Footnote: A love letter written to my long-lost childhood days in one of the forgotten suburbs of Kolkata, India.