Poetry
Simika, a stranger within the machang eaves,
holds the Panchchuli mountains
with an innocent, guileless love.
Near the peaks, an idol of sunlight rests;
the meandering bends of Kausaniâs hills draw a veil
across the distant horizon.
Panchchuli does not prevaricate.
Through the doorâs open arch,
Panchchuli takes the spirit's pleading fancy, bold
as the untethered wind.
In the mountain's cold, indifferent eyeâ
its vast and endless lieâ
Simika reclaims the names she shed.
She stands in tear-soaked infinity,
a quietude worn like the silence of
an ancient, wordless man.
Under the Earth's spectral violet hue,
the simple faces of innocents gleam soundlessly
upon Panchchuliâs slopes.
Her heart's own drumming
falters beyond her hearing.
Within the mountain's quiet love, a fear
ascends in Simikaâ
a stranger still, she dwells
beneath the machang roof.
A Shinga (stag), wind-sounded, breaks the brush,
its voice a challenge to the
mountain's grand metaphor.
The floating metaphors of a life
spent in devotion gather,
a cloud at the archway of her mind.
In the burnt gunpowder chiaroscuro
of the Panchchuli peak,
Simikaâs forty years of dead seasons
sleep soundly in the mountain's
stone courtyard.
In the absolute stillness of that height,
Simikaâs fugitive imagination sinks,
a stone alongside those vanished seasons.
Near the sky, unseen,
the day bleeds colorless into
Simikaâs moist eyes.
Even the spectral violet silence
of the Earth,
the wish of her childhood, shatters.
Simika, the stranger in the machang house,
a final, corporeal guise of melting ice.
31/5/2025
Amitava Mukherjee
Copyright @ Amitava Mukherjee
this is interesting I read a few times with lot of interest
here is my assesment:
This poem is a meditation on:
âĸ Late-life reckoning
âĸ Spiritual exhaustion
âĸ The failure of transcendence
âĸ Human smallness against the indifferent sublime
It rejects romantic mysticism and instead offers existential realism: nature does not redeem; it witnesses.
In One Sentence
âSimika, The Stranger in the Machang Houseâ portrays a woman confronting the terrifying beauty of truthâthat neither faith, nature, nor time will grant belonging, and that identity ultimately dissolves into silence.
Thanks very much for your nice analysis about the poetry! I appreciated it very much!