Two
Birds
I
trail the slow-swerving arcs
traced by swifts and swallows,
by
starlings and lapwings.
In this sharp pre-autumnal air,
their
intricate filigree-weaves
map our world with birdsong.
I
imagine I am a pair of these birds —
soaring across two hemispheres
in
their own private skies, flying
unplanned routes, charting
the
flow of foreign trade-winds.
Over the lakes, they see hovering
blue
rollers and kingfishers, even
an iridescent gloss-metal starling
longing
for her faraway consort —
a milk-white seagull on the Cape’s
winding
shores, keeping time with
Capricorn’s sharp ebbs and eddies.
They
do not conquer the skies,
they imbue them with richness —
these
are not grand designs,
they’re simple everlasting patterns.
Even
the lion-hearted red-beaked
toucan pales next to this
duo’s
pastel grace — their ballet
inking flight’s impossible curvatures.
Every
day, I map these chameleon
skies, refracting their colour-play.
Here,
the astral-skies prevail —
their deep deep-dark, their hint of
cosmic-blue,
overriding all shades.
I am a mere speck in this infinite
supernova
— and the two birds,
my heart’s auricle and ventricle.
Avian
haiku
azure-blue lidded
seagull
— gazing at a red-
lipped blue-bird, in love
Bird
Language
I would like to paint
the way a bird sings.
— Claude Monet
I
decipher bird language
through their tweets —
decoding
their twitter.
I feel their feathers ruffle,
hear
their slow whispers,
grade their plumule colours,
cup
their pliant bodies
with my heart’s mind.
Blue birds, red birds,
seagulls readily visit me
across
hemispheres,
continents and shores —
flying
spontaneously
at my imagination’s call.
No
airport clearances,
they fly on instinct,
buoyant
on their
own airborne dialect.
[This
selection forthcoming in the book “Red” (Pippa Rann, UK,
2026)]
Author’s
Bionote:
*Sudeep
Sen
[www.sudeepsen.org] is Professor of
Practice, Dept of English & Cultural Studies, Panjab University,
Chandigarh, India; Visiting Associate, Centre for Indian Studies in Africa
(CISA), University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, and Co-Chair,
Asia-Pacific Writers & Translators (APWT), Australia. Formerly, he was
Visiting Scholar at Harvard University, USA. He is a leading international poet
whose prize-winning books include: “Postmarked India: New & Selected
Poems” (HarperCollins), “Aria” (A K Ramanujan Translation
Award), “Fractals: New & Selected Poems | Translations 1980-2015” (London
Magazine Editions), “EroText” (Penguin), “Kaifi Azmi: Poems | Nazms”
(Bloomsbury), “Bhutan” (Drunken Boat, USA), “Anthropocene” (Pippa Rann,
Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize). “Red and Rock” completes ‘The Eco
Trilogy’. Edited landmark anthologies include: “The HarperCollins Book of
English Poetry”, “Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians” (Sahitya Akademi),
“Converse: Contemporary English Poetry by Indians” (Pippa Ran, UKn) and
“Himalayas” (Shearsman Books, UK), “Blue Nude: Ekphrasis & New Poems”
(Jorge Zalamea International Poetry Prize), “Rock” and “The Whispering Anklets”
are forthcoming. His photography represented by ArtMbassy, Rome/Berlin [http://www.artmbassy.com/artists.html], is part of
private/public collections. The
Government of India awarded him the senior fellowship for “outstanding persons
in the field of culture/literature.” Sen is the first Asian honoured to deliver
the Derek Walcott Lecture and read at the Nobel Laureate Festival.
