Ashok Niyogi
Ashok Niyogi is an Economics graduate from Presidency College, Calcutta, India. He made a career as an International Trader and has lived and worked in the Soviet Union, Europe and South East Asia in the ‘80s and ‘90s. At 52, he has been retired for some years and has been cashew farming, writing and traveling. He divides time between California, where his daughters live, Delhi and the Indian Himalayas. He has published a book of poems, TENTATIVELY, [ISBN : 0-595-33935-2] and has been extensively published in print and on-line magazines and in Chapbook form in the USA, UK, Australia, India and Canada.
GOLDEN TEMPLE
carp
orange red silver grey white
carp gulp up the eleventh day moon and open their mouths again
to light wavelets on the nectar
a temple all golden waxes and wanes in crests and troughs
on Bose speakers my heart is a harp
BORDER
razor wire rolls rip serpentine fog
lights green yellow and red sing high voltage barbed wire
thin angle-iron meanders to the map-maker’s whim
corn fields are already in night
our fog beats a retreat to their bugles electrocuted by our song
overhead a flight of swallows swoops in from our east banks and flies on into their sky their red setting sun
MEMORIAL
what struck me first is how far away the firing positions were from the walls with bullet-holes
which now need preserving in wooden frames rather innocuous as a backdrop for tourists with digital cameras
such mayhem must have required good aim
and then I am engulfed in shame
all my life I have tirelessly endeavored to teach myself and train that I could pick up the guns of those that massacred and learn their language so that I could write to them
JUNCTION
stayed back where the rails cross (chipped in the afternoon sun through a glass of milk-tea)
to read my book on one train in no hurry two tall turbaned cops
I’ll sit by the scooter-stand beneath a leafy tamarind tree on parcels lost in transit
while beefy women in pointed toes go klickety-klack on platform one
‘sniffer’ dogs wag fervent tails paunchy porters e-mail family
newly wed in red sob into cellular phones
bangles saddened by ripened corn in ultra-modern marriage halls
arched roof and brick walls SMS votes for a musical talent hunt
engines shunt
OVER A MUG OF BEER
“did you go there?”
“our Border Guards and their Rangers did you notice how tall they were handsome turbans medal watch
crisp command smart march knee jerk chin up brass bugles gleam with soul
while ‘Beating the Retreat’ we all wept”
BECAUSE I WAS OBSTINATE LAST FRIDAY
they’re not for me these girls with fashionable breasts already under strain of school going children
not mine those toes with painted nails hopefully slipping from heeled sandals onto asphalt road
where pebbles meander under police stare monitored by media glare
engineering is what meditation whispers into shirt shoulders that the tailor has narrowed
assuming a certain individuality
a refreshing intellectual unnerving with the unfolding of a ladybird’s most colorful wing in an optimistic winter sun
KIDNEY PIE
geometric or harmonic or arithmetic or just quantum disturbances in ‘club class’
this cold spot that they have just found is my bassinet in the universe
who cares
if she could but walk astral she would enthrall my Tibetan Lamas and be enthralled by certain animals of similar name that spit
I find incredible warmth in the unbelievable thought that she is still what she actually thinks she is
she is too ‘krakatul’ and loud
proud
_______ “krakatul” means tiny in Russian.
COMPOUND
she bathes a slate Saturn with oil from a copper urn
on thin mango branches they have put out swings laden with monsoon guilt
about an ebony phallus there are garlands of marigold elephantine
vermillion on my forehead piety between devastated eyebrows
shawls have come out of mothballs I trawl for guilt free evenings amidst puppeteers with alcoholic dolls
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