If I die in my sleep – is about bad dreams. It is a kind of virtual staircase – no matter if I go upstairs or down, I keep coming back to the same spot. It feels cold, it looks like a shadow or may be like viewing a negative of a film. Not every night, it was the same. It was few fragmented visuals – looks like phosphenes – colorful bubbles, unknown characters or even sometime known but with some uncanny touch, hazy & weird landscapes and obvious silence – may be sometime too much silence creates its own sound. At the end – there is always a strong feeling to go back to a safe home (may be that’s the reality) – but I can’t, or the home never existed – what you call Hiraeth.
Full Album View:
a dream within a dream
what if the sages were wrong
stoned out of their minds
what if I die
before this dream is over
Eve
say you never existed
there never was a garden
nor an apple
God lied
wiping out all desire
obliterating the past
the future; snow
more snow
on the way
I can no longer
write for sparrows
they fall from the sky and die
pick up my poems again
pretend to read them
wind waits for the hour
not yet
soon they’ll be swept away
leaves on the side of the road
no not yet
we vanish
like melting snow
birds of the air
that leave no trace
no echo on the wind
where do we belong
do we belong anywhere
if only we could live
for one day
in abandoned gardens of the world
silent words
drift off
into the distance
night train
enter the tunnel!
a scream within a scream
what if the sages were wrong
stoned out of their minds
what if I die
before this scream is over
A photographic doubt by Debiprasad Mukherjee
Tanka in responses by Gabriel Rosenstock
Tanka by Gabriel Rosenstock:
Born 1949 in postcolonial Ireland. Poet, tankaist, haikuist, novelist, essayist, playwright, author/translator of over 180 books, mostly in Irish (Gaelic). Member Aosdána (Irish academy of arts & letters). Lineage Holder of Celtic Buddhism, Former Chairman Poetry Ireland/Éigse Éireann.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Rosenstock/ http://roghaghabriel.blogspot.ie/
A LETTER FROM IRELAND
Dear Debi,
Beatha agus Sláinte! (That’s Irish for ‘Long life and health to you!’) Thank you so much for allowing me to be part of this current collaboration and for your kindness in allowing me to contribute to other projects by responding to your breath-taking photography with haiku and tanka, two Japanese literary genres that I have lovingly embraced. Tanka goes back about 1,300 years and so is the oldest form of poetry still cultivated today.
What does it mean, our work together? Your images become a portal through which I slip into another reality and outside of myself. To do this I must lose weight, so to speak, lose physicality, become spirit. In Japanese aesthetics, this is called hosomi, literally ‘slenderness’. Responding to your work with tanka and haiku, in simple, pared-down language, does not mean that I am a commentator, speaking from the outside. Interpenetration is how I work: having exited the self, I have nowhere to go except to wiggle myself into the mystery of your work and from the silence and wonder found therein, an utterance emerges.
@ Gabriel Rosenstock
DEBIPRASAD MUKHERJEE 