Sabyasachi Sanyal

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Unpublishing myself: Letters to Editor

Letter 16

Dear Editor,
I see nothing but symbols now. Everywhere.
Our identity has always been logocentric.

We emerged from flesh, from matter, as unbearable emotions
And when the sun drenched this visible world
We claimed everything
We put our clothes on desolate iron railings, to dry…

Today, rust stains my clothes, my idols--

Dear Editor, once, in search of identity and security,
man sought totems--petted wolves, when their ears drooped, turned them to dogs
made clay ducks, for their ponds…to peck at the unseen

Today, through lattice and shutters,
I see the same symbols rise, merciless--
like smoke from forgotten hearths, from distorted rituals--
their blistering hands gripping the  throat of the origin.

I understand today-- pasts distilled from nostalgia always hold blades in hands

All our fears come to being
groaning...
Killing.

Sabyasachi Sanyal writes primarily in Bengali. He has served as an associate editor for the Avant-Garde Bangla poetry magazine Kaurab for nearly two decades, and was a key figure in developing the “Circumcontentive poetry movement” a formally experimental, translingual, multi-epistemological writing style that emerged from Kaurab and was featured in Jacket 2. His work has appeared in numerous Bangla lit mags, Aufgabe, Locus journal, Action, Spectacle and is forthcoming in the Ilanot Review. A molecular Biologist by profession, Sabysachi now lives in Lucknow, India.