My Roots have Branched beyond Lines

My roots have branched beyond lines.

Creeping in peace beyond Kolkata and desh*,

I’ve locked my heart in tendrils of love

That blossom through my texts

Of Shakespeare and Keats

And beckon my being

To Boston and Rome,

For I might travel, with Eliot and Pound

And sing with Heaney and Faiz

Ghazals of loss and newly fashioned hope

That branch beyond lines and soar to the sky

And splatter in a canopy of light.

Spilled beyond boxes of bureaucratic forms,

Mine is the uncompassed sail into storms.

* A Bengali word meaning land/country.