How can we make love now, my love?
The dead corn stalks are standing as ghosts,
after tottering sometimes in knee-deep April rain.
Do they haunt the farmers’ dreams,
or have the farmers vanished?
How do they keep the faith?
Isn’t survival a wretched thing!
Did poets know about the farmers,
always walking on a tightrope with
a fine balance between one good crop,
in ten years and many failed ones?
Death is a vivid metaphor.
The late blighted potatoes and bodies of farmers,
hanging from the dry branches
of the forlorn banyan trees,
swinging in parallel.
How can we make love now, my love, when
our brothers and fathers, mothers with dry breasts,
drop one by one from the stage,
though the show goes on?
Isn’t love making an act of treason,
when you have corpses in your bed?
Moumita Alam is a poet from West Bengal. Her poetry collection The Musings of the Dark is available on Amazon.