TRANSCENDENCE
Bells peal atop Forever Mountain:
Sonorous hymns of dawn.
Birds scatter from the trees
As the echoes ripple away.
A priest sweeps away dust and shadows
From the temple’s mosaiced quadrangle.
Latticed windows pattern,
Shloka by shloka,
A hieratic weave of calligraphy
On the sanctum’s marble floor.
In the opaline pool of water,
Pink lotuses bloom
Under the metallic caress
Of freshly minted sunshine.
Dewdrops glisten—lustrous gems—
On the glaucous leaves
Of floating water-lilies.
Each shining diamond
Refracts into the universe
Of its own soul
The azure radiance
Of the infinite sky.
RUNGLEE RUNGLIOT
Half a moon’s hammer
on an anvil of thunderheads.
Fireflies spark
in the purple twilight.
Under the rhododendron trees,
cicadas count the beads
of night’s last rosary.
The hours stridulate
with their slow monotone.
Enamelled leaves
turn their backs
to the caressing breeze.
The smell of rain
lingers in the air,
staining the shadows
with a moist redolence.
The dawn rises, a monk
garbed in saffron robes.
The very colour of the sky
is distilled into a cup
of the fragrant brew.
Runglee Rungliot: A lush tea estate in the Himalayas. It was so named by a wandering Tibetan Buddhist monk, the moniker meaning ‘Thus far and no further’.
About the Poet
Srinjay Chakravarti is a writer, editor and translator based in Salt Lake City, Kolkata, India. A former journalist with The Financial Times Group, his creative writing, including poetry, short fiction and translations, has appeared in over 100 publications in 30-odd countries. He was educated at St Xavier’s College, Calcutta, and at universities based in Calcutta and New Delhi. University degrees: BSc (Economics honours), MA (English). His first book of poems Occam’s Razor received the Salt Literary Award from John Kinsella in 1995. He has won first prize ($7,500) in the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Poetry Competition 2007–08.
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