Two Poems by Aditya Shankar

Two Poems by Aditya Shankar

The House of My Old-man by Aditya Shankar

The house of my lonely old-man is a museum of clocks,
a museum of time

He keeps everything that cannot be undone:
probably multiple clocks in place of faithful country dogs—

the detectives obsessed with the forgotten
who raid our old fields and burrow deep
maintaining the eyes of a sad Buddhist,
not the grinning Dalai Lama in the calendar

The trade-off is simple:
scent of sunlight inside shady mangroves for Venetian blinds,
buzzing of jack-fruit flies for fans,
the entire house for the one who brought tanned pineapples from the field,
and left only the fragrance behind

The house of my old-man is a one-teacher school, the road to which
is a statement that has remained unsaid for years

The evidence it presents is unquestionable,
the exhibits are lost faces, not dials—

the one who passed by
the one who promised, but never came

He rang up office to say his clocks speak poetry—
a language that sweats soul through all pores
and burns bright like the sun
above the memories stacked in the attic

They sing like the old radio,
from the oldest of stations
constructing a lyric studded with similes—

to be heard only by the lonely,
the lords of time

Imagined in Three Quarters of a Second by Aditya Shankar

On a day when the pavement reeked sea-salt,
their city became a harbour

So as to keep a word to someone
to retrieve all that is temporarily lost
to mourn a long absence

sea played the raw music of a school band,
an endless symphony of melancholy

their fierce waves,
the jaw of an extinct predator retreating
with the bad omen of revenge

Betwixt a sleep and a sleep, as if between
two parallel sleepy alleys
no dream was washed away

The poet lost no images to the hungry crows,
though his words juxtaposed playful sea-fish

No one mistook a ship for an ancient sea animal

Sitting absent minded among pals in our regular restaurant,

Only that song which reminded you,
slowly revised itself with the rhythm of waves
and dissolved secretly into the depths.

Author's Bio: Aditya Shankar (b.1981, Thrissur, Kerala, India) is a bi-lingual writer and short film-maker. He writes in English and Malayalam, and publishes poetry and articles in leading journals, including The Little Magazine, The Word Plus, Indian Literature, The Literary X Magazine, Munyori, The Pyramid, Poetry Chain, Mastodon Dentist, The Wild Goose Poetry Review, Bayou Review, Meadowland Review, Words-Myth, Chandrabhaga, Miller’s pond, Message in a bottle, Aireings, Hudson View, Snakeskin, The Legendary, Literary Bohemian among others. His flash fiction has been published in The Caledonia Review and The Other Herald.

His short films have participated at International Film Festivals. Currently, he lives and works in Bangalore, after completing his B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering.

Aditya Shankar's poems are brilliant work of art. In the poem The House of My Old-man Aditya imagines himself to have grown old with life experiences while in Imagined in Three Quarters of a Second he is forlorn.