Mid flight

Bending over clouds
We are dunked, face first
Into the broken arteries of Kolkata:
Dissected torso of a civilization, blinking back

A vanishing sunset sprints
below a network of lacklustre lakes
suspended in time
Green stillness festering in colonial wounds

Our fingers trace her desiccated tributaries, desolate perimeters
Brittle sentences from a lost fable breaking at the seams
While miniaturised humanity rearranges
its beginning and end

A new story foaming
At the mouth of its river
Yearning for reinterpretation
from citizens in the sky

We realise
Mid-sentence and mid flight
are the same things
spoken skywards

Sanket Mhatre has been curating Crossover Poems ? a multilingual poetry recitation session featuring some of the most prominent Indian poets from multiple languages. Apart from this, he has also been featured at Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, Poets Translating Poets, Goa Arts & Literature Festival, Jaipur Literature Festival, Akhil Bharatiya Marathi Sahitya Sammelan, Vagdevi Litfest and Glass House Poetry Festival. His first book of cross-translated poems, Sarva Anshantun Apan / The Coordinates Of Us co-written with Rochelle Potkar has been released by Varnamudra Publications.