The Friday Poem: Deja Vu

“Déjà vu” by Kushal Poddar  

A bereaved woman speaks in déjà vu.

She drags you into a space repeating itself

blocks after blocks, time congealing,

spilling over the streets and the houses

the season’s last flies trapped inside

and making the walls wail. The net doors too.

You listen to the drone.

The woman asks for the seventh time

if you saw her daughter. Ever.

She stresses on the word ever.

You imagine it as the inside of a crop circle,

inside of a hollow pond surrounded by a million trees

whose roots suck the blue blood.

You want to remind her that you are her daughter,

roll the words toward your mouth

where-from they tumble downhill inside.

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Now that you’ve read the poem, here is a commentary by Benicia Patch Poetry Maestro Jeff Burkhart:

Today's poem comes to us from Kolkata, India and was written by Kushal Poddar. In our lives and our interactions with the world, all of us have experienced "deja vu" before. Saying, seeing or doing something and at once being haunted by the inescapable feeling we have lived this particular moment before. In this piece, Mr. Podder uses the term in a different way. His poem is set in a hot place as the season ends. Our ears are filled with the drone of the sluggish, final surviving flies. We hear an old woman asking our heroine over and over in her own droning voice, if she has seen her daughter....ever. The irony is that she is the woman's daughter. The terrible onset of dementia that so many of us have experienced with our aging loved ones, has erased a lifetime of love and experiences and left only a worried, sad and confused semblance of the mother that raised her. The one she knew. The one that knew her. The mother is lost in the labyrinth of a crop circle. The waters of the pond that once was her conscious mind, sucked dry by the roots of the surrounding trees.

Alas, an explanation will bring no clarity and will have to be repeated again and again. Deja vu. 

Until next week,
Jeff Burkhart 

Read more about Kushal Poddar here.

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