Poverty Poisons My Beauty | Ujjal Mandal

Poverty doesn’t tell a poem of happiness
but of the hungry vultures awaiting the dead body,
I am hungry.

Poorness is the shadow of mine, it follows me where I go,
it poisons my beauty; it is the stone on my way,
it is the villain in my story and so on.
My fantasy is on fire from poverty,

I am hungry.
I dream today the fall of red leaves whirling by,
I can’t hear the gentle whisper
of spring which I could before, but
Often I dream of a dry tree, standing on a rock 
looking straight ahead, with not a single leaf
no butterfly comes to it, no birds make it musical.
And it is so motherly that I find a huge
similarity between the dead tree and me.

Ujjal Mandal is an Indian poet and a connoisseur of literature who was born in 1995 at Ganguria, Malda, West Bengal. He has two poetry books to his credit– “Ambrosia In Budding Flowers”(English), “Shobder Phul”(Bengali) which are available on Amazon. He has qualified WBSET in 2020 and beside having published a research paper titled “Tagore’s The Golden Boat: A Critical Study in Context of Deconstruction Theory and the British Colonialism”, his poetry has been appeared in India & abroad in various journals, magazines, literary press, blogs and in diverse poetry anthologies such as — ‘Aulos: An Anthology of English Poetry’, ‘PS: It’s Poetry’, ‘Beyond Corona: The Silver Lining’ ‘Insulation’, ‘I Want to Live’ by Inner Child press and others. To him, “poetry is the philosophical and spiritual creation by the combination of heart and mind”.