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Loosened from the 
narrative of my own living 
is a world
that is 20 years dead. I am awake at night 
doing modest things:
shuffling, sailing, remembering.
I am a cloud nomading, 
I see the weight of my heart
adrift in the sky... beneath it I become the falls, aching
by the sand—its trembling hands hold me, 
for a moment, I am inordinate; 
pitch black Atlantic where I swim free with the sea, 
the navel of my being
splits open before me like a pear. 
No piece of me looks for meaning there, 
but how do I memorialise this? 
I hear, everyone is moving somewhere hollow—these 
things mean nothing to me. White noise, chatter,
a great, big world where nothing belongs, 
silence…barrenness placed next to my own life.
Beside it, I try not to become a ghost.
I have been reading the Odyssey, 
feeling foreign even on my own couch. 
There is not a thing I could salvage
from my own breaking, yet I must just endure.
I learn to remember some small details:
twice I die, passing through the ordeal 
of feeling rootless, 
the rooms grow errant,
yellow suburban light
morph into the shores, I weep alone in silence.
I tell myself through it all, and
carry my bones under sinking stars; 
this brief, crepuscular life that breaks you
is a memory...
like death in a shell. 
Remember always…Ithaca.
 

Snata Basu is a writer based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Her poetry has appeared on various literary platforms including The Opiate, Visual Verse: An Online Anthology of Art and Words, and Small World City.

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