Papiya Lahiri

Legends of Tomorrow are a Misfit Today

 

Those tiny crevices of leaking dreams

giving birth to an ingenious embryotic idea

hibernating in utter silence

 

Erupting all of a sudden with great gusto and momentous clarity

Into the light with doubts lurking behind every face seeing a face

And people knowing it all in another billowing wave trying

to suck in the madcap

 

But madcap as the name qualifies

Won’t nudge towards that hole

And as if lost in a wonderland so beautiful to be true

Relishes in an other-worldly ‘fancy’ of no origin

 

Until the perfume spreads, so pleasant

That everyone seems to have a whiff

And know more about it

 

By now the dates have changed

And no more living is the madcap

Yet uniting with the universal reality of today!

 

Just one more night

Let me not call for another day

For I have work to do

A lot to do

 

Let me be understood as being wrong

For just another day

One more day

 

I will definitely call, but wait before it dawns

Enjoy the wait

Another restless day

 

Let me call and clarify

Thinking of this day so often

But indifferently

 

Today I want to call

Morning sun whispered it to me

But soon the dark night lulls me to sleep

Tarry a little

Just one more night!

About the author: Papiya Lahiri is currently teaching in the Department of Humanities and Modern European Languages, University of Allahabad, Prayagraj, India. Lahiri has directed and conceptualized Indian and European plays including those of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Tagore, Ibsen and Tennessee Williams.

As a poet and an author she has read poems at various national and international poetry festivals in India and abroad as well as presented research papers and articles to wide national and international audiences at numerous seminars/conferences/symposiums organised by various institutions and academic bodies. She has authored a book on Canadian drama and theatre, entitled Sharon Pollock the Playwright: The Personal and the Political Ordeal (2017). Her poetry anthology is entitled Seeds of Time (2018).