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Saturday, March 26, 2016

TELESCOPE AND NIGHT ORNAMENTS

by Debasis Mukhopadhyay


Image from “Museum of War Syria” by Tammam Azzam at Foreign Policy, April 29, 1913.


      Through the trap door of the night sky the telescope brings you the debris of million suns shimmering on a canvas you liked all along
      The bright night of Van Gogh crawling into your eyes makes you forget that the bone color priming can also be grown into a moonlit canvas
      Like History
      Everything in the underpainting is meant to be painted over
      The manna of bombs that astound the bodies with brightness
      And the bodies that gather in the pit waiting to grow wings of no consequence
      Yes but everything in the dead coloring is intended to be painted over
      To swallow such brightness in your canvas you can paint the clouds that glint ringing my brother's skull
      Into an hourglass that swells lolling on my mother's chest
      There is no blood between her breasts doves just coo and sugar ants lick all witness
      She pauses to dream
      The dreams that look into the muddy darkness beneath your feet for ornaments of tomorrows or yesterdays


Debasis Mukhopadhyay lives & writes in Montreal. Recent poems have appeared in The Curly Mind, Yellow Chair Review, Thirteen Myna Birds, Of/With, I am not a silent poet, The New Verse News, With Painted Words, Silver Birch Press, Foliate Oak, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Snapping Twig, Eunoia Review, Revolution John, and Down in the Dirt.