In The Comfort of Blue Horizons
By Madhu Kailas
In the comfort of blue horizons, and far from the ruins
of my heart, I learn to sing in your praise—the first word.
To an empty audience whose clamour of desires
fade into accelerating distance.
I arrive to open my silence at your feet
in a solitary ceremony contained in a new world.
For long, I had wanted to grow up into a street peddler
selling stories of three sentences.
One, to fill my belly to a point of sated belch.
Two, to sprinkle laughter and become spring fever.
Three—remained the unfathomable silence
in exile for a lifetime.
A quest, a crusade, a devotion for nothingness.
Quiet streets of unfinished stories in thick settlements.
Eyes of bricks, eyes of glass, eyes of people—
in thick of human cries, I am invisible to my own eyes.
In the comfort of blue horizons,
I arrive to open my silence and listen.
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Madhu Kailas is the pen name of Kingshuk Basu. He is a native of Kolkata, India and has lived in various places in India and USA. He is the author of two poetry selections, The Birds Fly in Silence, 2014 and The Boatman of Murshidabad, 2021. He has been published in journals like Indian Literature, The Amistad, Acumen, Slippery Elm, The Gateway Review, The Marathon Literary Review, Dragon Poet Review, New Mexico Review, Sutterville Review, Plainsongs Magazine, The Literary Voyage, and Langlit. He lives with his wife and children in Mumbai.