No Budgerigar | Ananya Dutta Gupta

I am an uneven bird, 
Quite contrary. 
All your cajole
Lay heavy, unmoving,
Upon my heart,
My brooding,
Incubating shut-eyed
Hen of a heart,
That won't budge
From the egg of torpor
Toasting under 
Her warm underdown.

Flights of freedom
Brook not a prompt. 

21 May 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.