Saudades, 1936 by Gopal Lahiri

Silence is more musical than song in this rust-pink
house, an art deco home, the afterlife from colonial era,
the roughage of the pavement redraws the history,
in the night Mount Carmel Road unread the world.

Faded wallpaper, the lion figures, the high ceilings
invite a deep, melancholic longing inside.
The rooster in the roof and the soldat statue forge
Portuguese language, drop chaos of memories on my palm.

There is a sense now that my every nerve is sedated.
In the conjuring of light, I bow to the palm trees and
grass roots and a bunch of silver white flowers.
And I chew words that taste like slag and platelets.

I lean towards the boundary wall of Saudades
and my focus is hushed and curtained,

I watch a rose-ringed parakeet on the terrace
it flutters down; it stabs my heart and flies away.

Gopal Lahiri is a bilingual poet, critic, editor, writer and translator with 33 books published, including eight solo/jointly edited books. His poetry and prose are published across more than one hundred fifty journals and anthologies globally.  Gopal's poems are translated in 18 languages and published in 16 countries. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize for poetry in 2021 and Best of the Nets for poetry, 2025.