Remembering - Anuja Mitra
if you can you can try to recall
the sun across the roof and you
knee-deep in childhood playing
near the fence with the storm
of daisies still impressionable
in the way of dreams still
believing leaves had voices
and you might then remember
curtains drowned in burnished light
how at night the sky emptied
into a field of stars leaching out
the guilt you’d soon forget unlike
the woman you called Nana who kept
knitting you hats while you kept not
writing back and maybe then you’d know
the injustices you had no part in
the lady who bought your house how
she ravaged your kingdom while
you were away oh these memories
spiralling into memories into
nothing this helter skelter art of
remembering this bending
over backwards running out of light
Ascent - Anuja Mitra
I would like to step outside myself.
To bow from my body and its trivial griefs.
So I rise: above
forests, deserts, seas.
I rise
and it feels just how “ascent” sounds.
The soft beginning,
the reverent end.
I become monarch of the crooked sky;
clouds name their heirs for me.
Soon I am written into sunsets,
cutting the ribbon on new galaxies.
Constellations forget their places.
Even gravity grows fond again.
Dining one day I feel the pull of trees,
the earth calling me home.
My plan backfires:
I have become too loved.
Now I am falling through the arms of stars,
wingless as a thing newborn.
I realise this is happiness
only when I look down.
Contributor's Note
Anuja Mitra is a university student. Her work was featured in the National Library exhibition “The Next Word: Contemporary New Zealand Poetry” and can also be found in Signals, Starling and Sweet Mammalian. She is co-founder of the new online literary magazine Oscen at oscen.co.