TALKING POETRY

Sudeep Sen

Sudeep Sen [www.sudeepsen.net] is the 2004 recipient of the prestigious ‘Pleiades' honour at the world's oldest poetry festival — the Struga Poetry Evenings, Macedonia — for having made “significant contribution to modern world poetry”. Sen studied at St Columba's School and read literature at Delhi University and in the USA. As an Inlaks Scholar, he completed an MS from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York. Winner of many international and national prizes, he was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship (UK) and nominated for a Pushcart Prize (USA) for poems included in Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins). More recently, he has published Postcards from Bangladesh , Prayer Flag, Distracted Geographies, and Rain. As an invited author representing his country, he has read his work worldwide, and has been translated into several languages including Arabic, Bengali, Czech, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Macedonian, Malayalam, Persian, Romanian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. Sen has been an international poet-in-residence at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh, and a visiting scholar at Harvard University. He is the editorial director of Aark Arts .

Heather

I lie next to the sea. It is dead still, except for the invisible rippling soundless undulations the water
makes as it breathes. There is no moonlight, but it is not pitch dark.

You kiss me everywhere — everywhere, for hours and hours and hours. My lips are dry, my body
salt-encrusted. You have eaten every bit of pleasure, yours and mine. I feel parched, dry, in spite of all
the plenitude of water and our body-sweat.

The sand too is sweating beneath us. Every grain remembers every wave, every caress, leaving behind
just salt, a silver layer of salt as a gift — a talisman of love, of their inconsistent meetings.

I feel parched like the sea-salt gauze. My tongue is parched in spite of your lavender saliva, saliva
which changed from that bouquet to the taste of heather, wild weather-ravaged heather.

I look around for light, but I can only see reflection. There is more beauty in second-hand glaze —
sky's dark light radiating off your lashes, water's blue light that you hid in your navel, the beach's
grainy light that you left unwiped on your nipples, and the light's invisible inner light that you stored
in your pupils.

The sea is getting restless. But I am dead still, except for the inaudible swishing that one can hear
when you press yourself against my heart.

I need to taste the grainy light that you wrap your skin in, each and every grain that maps the slow
deliberate contours of your body.

Sun-Blanched Blood (html link)

Mediterranean (html link)

Jacket on a Chair (html link)

Offering (html link)