Clashing with Fury — Three Poems by Shreyashi Mandal

An Icy Grey Dream

Thinking about individual consumption patterns,

I turned out the light

wondering if the need to lick wounds

as a cat at a musty counter

bearing a polished mouse:

as reward to its careless master

now ardent, then stone-cold;

then ardent, now stone-cold.

He strokes its head and says— he must return to another place.

As the night diffuses, slightly tragic, somewhat funny,

in my sleep, this wretch;

its head buried between my feet, starts shivering and mauling.

And I sprint off

to another snug structure.

But lo, another pompous master!

Slowly the ginger loosens its claws and there is no one, but me.

My feet still;

a little more elongated than it was yesterday.

Clashing with Fury

Someone hire a search party

for Fury, flowing retrogradely,

caught a strange woman by surprise over exorbitant monsoon fares.

The spirit, delighted she knew nothing of its nature,

deposited somewhere near her gut.

Doses of antacids later,

one day, when the knot was caught;

straightened out; and humbled,

it was abandoned outside a clinic like a damaged Matryoshka doll.

Come July, in another collision,

it excused itself and sat across the woman, dead serious,

as a fine carcass.

No more an underlying issue

its neck stiff, veins blue,

on the brink of eruption when requested to get out of her sight.

It went about clashing with autos and cycles in the service road

till it grew bone-tired and died down.

The police would expect pools of blood flowing towards the sewers

but Fury, having suffered severe injuries, turned about;

disappearing into the crowd of passengers

waiting for the slowest bus home.

Gentle Waves

He could go at any length to start a fire;

hike the tallest tower carrying a backpack

loaded with precise disagreements.

The gentleman is not in favour of peacekeeping;

he’d much rather lose his voice at a protest today,

or buy roses to mock an armed opposition:

let pyramids fall at the strike of a fingernail,

with calculated precision.

Cordoned off, forbidden to cross the perimeter

for a minute, he drops his load at the nearest coast

sinking into the sea of imagination.

The fisherwomen admiring him

do not have an inkling of this idealist

who whispers affection like a spent man.

As curious as a TVS probe, as tall as David

and as barren as a desert, he bathes in the breaking waves

then hastens and picks up the weight;

he’s yet to learn to start a fire.

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About the Poet:

Shreyashi is a research scholar at the Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University. She resides in a suburban town about an hour away from Kolkata. She turns to poetry occasionally, in the midst of writing her thesis. Her poems have appeared in Third Lane Magazine, The Blahcksheep, Miracle Monocle, and Gulmohur Quarterly.