3 poems by Susmit Panda

To Whom It May Concern

From the bridge’s end a voice: Much sorrow,
   much grief there is—or where we live
is not the world, and we should jest and jive
as if the feet had shed their marrow.

Dead, you think you won’t die again. 
   Rocks like a flame your lifted hair.
In time the woods will catch, and everywhere
   burnt dust will suffocate your pain.

What then?! I do not come an orphan
   to pledge togetherness by grief:
two dying could not love each other to life. 
If Love is Fair, not all, my dolphin,

is fair in love. Love’s tread is certain,
   if light; his purpose just, if slow;
His will, that one should find a berth more low
than one’s ill-hoping heart to hurt in.





 
Like The Black Seed Within The Flame

Like the black seed within the flame,
   How full of love I sat.
I felt the hands that felt the gleam,
   I singed them just for that!—

Far off, the lake is stiff with swans
   Like refuse gathered, still.
One spreads her wings, as if to dance,
   But longs, I know, to kill.





 
Whispers Unsurrendered

The broken world before your pitiless eyes
    Is what it is, does what it can:
The child is slapped; the man-child cries,
    Grim also-ran!

And yet, forgive the earth her hurt, her proud,
   Their mighty vent from end to end—
The least you can for those without
   You for a friend. 

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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.