Nightjar | Ananya Dutta Gupta

I have seen 
A nightjar now and then,
A bird flying at night,
Flying past at night,
Something like a bird
Flying past at night,
Something flying past 
At night,
Just when 
The headlights alighted
On them.
A head-on collision
Of two contrary needs.
Light. And darkness.
Our lights won.
Our seeing lost.


20 June 2022

Ananya, trained at Jadavpur and Oxford, has been teaching and researching English Literature for two decades. She was Charles Wallace India Trust Visiting Fellow at Cambridge in 2015. She has research articles, translations, essays and travelogues to her credit. In poetry, she responds to her immediate human milieu and non-human environs with a combination of curiosity, intuitiveness and criticality. The past four years have seen her publish poetry with Tell Me Your Story, Muse India, Gulmohar Quarterly, Indian Ruminations, Cafe Dissensus, RoughKhata and Teesta Review. Her poem ‘Howrah Junction’ – was one among twenty internationally selected entries in Global Conversations (CRASSH, Cambridge (2021). Her debut collection of eighty bird poems, For Tomorrow the Birds Might Still Sing (Santiniketan: Birutjatio, 2021), is in circulation now.