Culture & Society

Poem: Of Letters and Addresses

Sekhar Banerjee writes a poem for 바카라 on an elegiac recollection of the old postman days when our limitations in communication compelled us to attach more value and permanence to letters.

A postman delivering postal mails
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We don’t write letters anymore
and we don’t get them either. We have gone too far

from each other or else, come closer enough to write

a personal letter. We text petite texts and receive long,
boring work mails.
We are happy with that because we can talk and make
video calls.

But we are becoming secretly quiet. Like a conch

shell with a restless silence. Words entwine our
eyes and fingers when we earnestly try
to stitch
them together and they fall off from the pages, our eyes
and hands. Blank sheets

flutter everywhere like white propositions in some

manoeuvring conference as we embark
on a journey to a silent place where all mute things
reside.
Like loss. Like private letters.
Only a graduate opaqueness
waits at last,

only a ripe attitude remains; the gist

of things that we essentially tried together as a mode
of private communication before we
accept with perfect grace and equal clumsiness

that we failed

to yield enough common words. But it seems
quite natural to feel
the footsteps of a bevy of retired postmen, like any other
retired poet or meteorologist,

roaming the towns and the streets,

carrying lost letters with good news. They search you
in your old home
where you don’t live anymore.

(Sekhar Banerjee바카라 웹사이트is a Pushcart Award and Best of the Net Award nominated poet.바카라 웹사이트 He has been published in바카라 웹사이트Stand Magazine,바카라 웹사이트Indian Literature,바카라 웹사이트Arkana, The Bitter Oleander,바카라 웹사이트Ink Sweat and Tears,바카라 웹사이트The Lake,바카라 웹사이트Madras Courier, 바카라, The Wire,바카라 웹사이트The Bangalore Review, Kitaab바카라 웹사이트and elsewhere.바카라 웹사이트He is a former Press Secretary to the Governor, West Bengal.바카라 웹사이트He lives in Kolkata, India.)

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