4 poems by Susmit Panda

After-Dinner Walk On The Terrace 

If only I could set things straight, I might. 
But I am spent! I miss my family. 
Has brother left the building for the night?

The sink is chockablock, the TV’s bright
And muted, roaches raid the cutlery.
If only I could set things straight, I might. 

Isn’t it time? The far-ranked bulbs that light
The dirty steps will blink out suddenly. 
Has brother left the building for the night?

I might, in darkness inching down the flight
Of steps, trip on somebody, till I cry:
If only I could set things straight, I might. 

The crescent moon is aging in plain sight.
The pickets wrap back into obscurity
—If only I could set things straight, I might. 
O brother, have you left us for the night?



 
I Am The Mythic Bird

I am the mythic bird
our maid told me about back when I was
a broken, school-fled wuss.
This bird, she said, its plumage starred
with specks of ichor blood,
never slept except
with its feet held up, should
the sky fall while it slept,
so it could prop the sky up with its feet,
and save itself, if not the world.
And thus the bird sleeps on, complete
apart from flight, self-curled,
self-rolled. Why, if not for this bird, she said,
the sky would fall upon your head. 



 
Fear And Trembling

At prick of pubic hair, I heard Love throb
And leaving all else, answered with a sob.
I watched the world change before my own eyes
As my percussion bowls began to rise,

And I with them until, swept far from land,
I came down with a bang, to pieces split,
My china limbs strewn this way and that, and
This way and that the bowls transformed to grit.

Made man again (resculpturing, stark grim),
I saw the bowls, remade, set out in place,
Some sparely filled, and some filled to the brim—
The stilly water in each showing my face.

Like a ten-headed, heartless colossus there
I sat, and struck half-ghoulishly each bowl,
Ten times more broken, thoughtful, once to spare
Myself the horror of being made so whole. 



 
All Swans Are White

All swans are white, let the black swan rehearse!
Don’t trust the glass, it will reflect a dream;
Don’t trust your image in the puddle cursed
To pass to zilch, zilch therefore to esteem.
Hard ground comes into view, hard, walked-on earth,
The trodden keyboard of the feathered race—
Put down your other foot wound up since birth,
And catch the broken melody of the place!

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Susmit Panda, born in 1996, is a poet living in Kolkata. His poems and criticism have appeared in Boog City, Coldnoon, Indian Cultural Forum, Guftugu, The Boston Compass, and The Journal (London), and are forthcoming in Fulcrum: An Anthology of Poetry and Aesthetics. He participated in the Poesia 2021 World Poetry Day Festival. 

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