Gopal Lahiri is a bilingual poet, critic, editor, writer and translator. He is the author of 21 books published mostly (13) in English and a few (8) in Bengali, including four jointly edited books. His poems have been published worldwide across various journals and anthologies. Recent credits: Ink Sweat & Tears, Verse Virtual, Harbinger Asylum, Borderless Journal, Spillwords, Indian Periodicals, Setu, Muse India, Glomag and elsewhere. He has attended various poetry festivals in India and abroad. He is published in 12 countries and in 12 languages. He lives in Kolkata, India. He has jointly edited Indo-American anthology titled ‘Bridging Continents’ published by Zarin Publications, Kolkata. His latest collection of Haiku and short poems titled ‘Return to Solitude’ was published from Hawakal Publishers, Kolkata. He has recently edited a book on translation of Tagore songs titled’ Selected Songs- Rabindranath Tagore’ published by Abhijan Publisher, Kolkata.
Cityscape
Out there in the whirring street
the pigeons huddle on the broken pavement,
dark slum boys resign
to their pale and silent utterance
and stay starved.
The evening light trembles, spilling beyond
the brown pillar’s edge, come closer to the
normal, the entry path wants footsteps,
searching the inheritances of sounds,
of laughter, of high octave notes.
The marble door has the feel of a
gothic afterword; the cadences resolve into
perfect peace, the bus and motor horns go mute,
night birds loop their voices in layers of
soft, radiant textures;
Hints of shadow keep pulses of vocal fire out
like blips into an empty space,