[71 words]
The musical instruments
in the wooden cabinet are still alive.
Their accompanying sounds—
when mother used to sit
with her harmonium—
have not escaped
the walls of this house.
The air isn’t mute. Every night
it walks barefoot to my loneliness
with her songs and notes
and makes me gather my fragments
to bury them without pain.
I turn into stone in my sleep
and wake up to create more fragments.
Sonnet Mondal is an Indian poet, editor, and author of An Afternoon in My Mind (Copper Coin 2022), Karmic Chanting (Copper Coin 2018), Lautati Dopaheren (Rajkamal Prakashan Pvt. Ltd 2024), and seven other books of poetry. He has read as an invited poet at literary festivals in USA, Macedonia, Ireland, Turkey, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, France, Germany, Italy, Ukraine, Hungary, Madagascar, South Africa, and Slovakia. Mondal was one of the authors of the Silk Routes project of the IWP, University of Iowa from 2014 to 2016 and was Guest Writer in Residence at the Almaty Writing Residency in 2023.
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