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Ashok Niyogi was born in 1955 and graduated with Honors in Economics
from Presidency College, Kolkata, India. He has been in international trade and has travelled
the world over including a 10-year stint as an expatriate in Yeltsin's Russia.
His poems have been published widely. Ashok's three collections of Poetry are Crossroads, Reflections
in the Dark and Tentatively.
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Water Sport
It is not good,
This jumping with bicycles
Into Lake Tahoe,
While fallen pinecones clap in glee.
Serpents underwater
May shackle feet to pedals,
Air will self-exhaust,
It is not good,
This going in and coming out.
Take off down the embankment,
Pedal furiously on the boardwalk
Wharf planks all aflutter,
Up with the front wheel,
Into thin air, wheels free,
Cart wheeling into a splash.
A boat waits nearby
To collect the debris,
Beach slippers float about,
Before lungs surface and gulp in air,
It is not good,
This going in and coming out.
Up above, there is a momentary lull,
The tether sags penumbral,
A sky glider wafts down
Palms clutching Para straps,
His canopy is like the wrinkled breast
Of an ageing whore.
He idly watches the cyclist surface,
As his mother launch
Steers to starboard.
He catches a wind drift and soars up,
The tether twangs,
His canopy is now once more
An adolescent breast, taut with milk.
On the surface, with the ripples
The cycle bobs up and down aimlessly,
While the cyclist swims to shore,
To mindless cheers from the crowd.
It is not good,
This going in and coming out.
I tell the setting sun,
It is not good,
This going in and coming out.
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Indian Spring
Even was there this casting couch,
I would have naught but life to offer,
Some snow flakes, some sweltering heat
A little bit of illness,
Through the night
A little fresh air.
Unlock me the key to the 'wisdom' world,
What apprehension, why tears?
No epics to emote,
Immune to ebbs and flows,
In my library tower working at Marlowe,
Unmoved by nascent mango leaves.
The time has come to put up swings,
Braided pig tails floating in jet streams,
Green mango quickly pickled
In brine and mustard oil,
And spitting out of watermelon pips.
Now is the time to read Anna Akhmatova,
Just like Frost in the flaming New England autumn,
Fresh gone by,
Or now is the time not to read at all.
I am too lazy for polemics, the weather is just so,
And I will think about me tomorrow,
Now is the time for the wispy clouds
Those poetry editors like, in windy Chicago.
Unfashionable, but Freudian don't you think?
Where does that kind of poetry take you
Chechnya or New Orleans?
Boat or bullet or leaking innards,
Why string words together
About some remote untouchable thing?
When all you have to do,
Is bite into a green mango
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Darkness And Light
it is like a narcotic
this darkness in the room
streetlights
aircraft warning lights
car lights
strobe lights
lights through the front window
why do you want
this darkness early
today is only a weekday
when carpools work
the Mexican ice-cream vendor
went by on time
why then
this foetal huddle
in your blanket
why the feline eye
burning bright
why these eyelids
that will not blink
why this ship
that will not sink
why should it dawn
fawn coloured dawn
through an aircraft window
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2004-2005 the Dublin Quarterly--to see familiar things with unfamiliar eyes!
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