Swallow | Ananya Dutta Gupta

They put a swallow in a cage.
It fought and fluttered,
Squacked and scattered,
And generally ran amok.
And then they asked,
Whatever got into you?
The bars of the cage,
She said.
The bars are outside, 
They said.
I swallowed them,
She said.
And they called her the mad swallow.

31 July 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.