Image from “Museum of War Syria” by Tammam Azzam at Foreign Policy, April 29, 1913. |
Through the trap door of the night sky the telescope brings you the debris of million suns shimmering on a canvas you liked all along
The bright night of Van Gogh crawling into your eyes makes you forget that the bone color priming can also be grown into a moonlit canvas
Like History
Everything in the underpainting is meant to be painted over
The manna of bombs that astound the bodies with brightness
And the bodies that gather in the pit waiting to grow wings of no consequence
Yes but everything in the dead coloring is intended to be painted over
To swallow such brightness in your canvas you can paint the clouds that glint ringing my brother's skull
Into an hourglass that swells lolling on my mother's chest
There is no blood between her breasts doves just coo and sugar ants lick all witness
She pauses to dream
The dreams that look into the muddy darkness beneath your feet for ornaments of tomorrows or yesterdays
Debasis Mukhopadhyay lives & writes in Montreal. Recent poems have appeared in The Curly Mind, Yellow Chair Review, Thirteen Myna Birds, Of/With, I am not a silent poet, The New Verse News, With Painted Words, Silver Birch Press, Foliate Oak, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Snapping Twig, Eunoia Review, Revolution John, and Down in the Dirt.