Last Barrier

Not so much the shared
Trajectory of the conflicts and hatred,
The broken pillars and staircases
Resonate the hidden wounds and anguish and the kinship
Between the two.

The images perhaps shot by the
Evening, not for crisis restoration,
Pains and scars rewrite one after another
The long and short melody and dreams
In unknown scale and notations.

We often view history
Through the soft lenses of black and white hues,
Footsteps blur and ultimately the imagined words
Carry the missing pieces
In the puzzle of the bygone days.

Nights are like wide brushstrokes,
The glass windows
recording the veins of the forgotten hands,
clutching the bags of silver and cuticles of the fingernails,
The stormy winds now break the last barrier.

Gopal Lahiri is a bilingual poet, critic, editor, writer and translator with 29 books published, including eight solo/jointly edited books. His poetry and prose are published across more than seventy journals and anthologies globally. His poems are translated in 16 languages. He has been nominated for Pushcart Prize for poetry in 2021. He has received Setu Excellence Award, Pittsburgh, US, in poetry. He is the first recipient of. Jayanta Mahapatra National Award for Literature, 2024. Read other articles by Gopal.