Poetry: Sayak Roy Chowdhury

Sounds of Silence

When you stop talking
The crickets fill up the silence.
The ticking clock,
Water, dripping in an empty bucket
The barking dogs in some faraway lane
A shouting child,
A quarreling couple
Gossiping televisions
Suddenly throng my nerves.
They just don’t shut up like you.
They simply don’t give up.
And that ceaseless noise from inside…

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Elders

They talk about people
They talk about home.
They argue on their fate,
Sports, politics and the drainage system.
Moreover, the monsoon is delayed
By 13 days this year.
Their children are weak at vernacular
Their parents are weak at sensibility
And they have been weak at calculations
All the time.
So they are being deceived,
Or are they dodging deceptions?
They have seen the worse days.
They have trudged the harder way.
Indeed. And their stories are all told
Long before they could finish them.

But now…
Now they are keeping secrets.

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Sayak Roy Chowdhury is about to be graduated this year as an electrical engineer from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. He fantasies he can write poetry and bullies others to read them; he finds his friends scampering all around when he approaches with his red diary.