Dr. Amitabh Mitra was chosen as "Best Entry" in an April 2nd Themed Prompt, titled, "Gazing at Moon From the Balcony". Another poem was chosen as a "Best Entry" as well as a painting, in our weekly "Anything Friday" offerings held each week on our Facebook Group. Dr. Mitra is quite multitalented, not only is he a Trauma surgeon, he is a publisher, poet, and an avid photographer and painter as you will observe below. I have added extra poems that Dr. Mitra submitted to ILA, previously. It's Here...
The theme of godfather is playing somewhere
and my mind once again tries to open a long shuttered window
on pall bearer of shadows
and sadness of a sun
dimmed by an incongruous
sky
It's here in a Gwalior palace
moments entwined with moss
and lichen kept their eyelids open
for a stray summer ray or a fragrance
unforgotten from a wisp of your night breast
on that night
It's here in a Gwalior palace
beasts of wind beat the stonewalls
in frantic passions
trying since long
to unveil your hair
and a tangled evening heavy with another days feeling
It's here in a Gwalior palace
I had once held your hand
and asked you of dawn and destiny
of the heart
caught in silk
of bare-thread talk
Since then I have changed my name so many times
I have treaded many evenings at different times
I have forgotten the dusk many a times
I have recalled a night so many times and
I have slept in your smile many a times.


© Amitabh Mitra and in such nights
when loneliness recurs
in
the eye of lost twilights
I think of u
as always
desperation
breaks even
on a sky
seeking the rebellion
of old streets
and thoughts


© Amitabh Mitra Photograph below by Dr. Mitra and then the sun
swept a sea
and red horizons
fell
in the far depths
of a tenor
the swirling dervishes
at a bereft
mausoleum
chased the mind
to seas
skies
and the orbis

time plunged
from old trees
older forts
leaving a carpet
of brown
shades
and you once
suggested an
anarchic
revelation
your lips
shared just
a whisper
in blue


© Amitabh Mitra Gwalior
there is a river closing in on a
night of shifting blues
ascending the dark.
a cluster sky
clang closes the gates.
paths and palaces hurtle
merging in a silk sheen touch.
your eyes take over the
suddenness of everyday
forlorn tantrums of a skin and
brittle memories rush in
before the fort
falls to a splintered dawn. © Amitabh Mitra "another sudden day"

I had met you on a day when red flowers
stormed a hesitant sky. I couldn't understand then
the red saree, the red bindi and your red bangles,
abrasions scarring a river that I had never known
the red tram that took us to Park Street, broke through
your smile and small talk. drinking tea of chipped cups,
your red lips, you knew I yearned to write of subterfuges
and shadows in a rundown cafe' closing the sun.
even the rising moon broke
in a rendezvous of red horizon
sifting memories on a balcony
whispers of a red flower on
another sudden day.


© Amitabh Mitra these are the days
when a mind yearns
to escape a landscape of
runaway seasons
there are sudden rains
a cloudburst of static
expectations
and then a sun
shone on a darkside
of manymemorylanes
manyafterthoughts
a heart slows down
in the eye of a twilight
time passes


© Amitabh Mitra The images in the slider below are either photography taken by Dr. Mitra or taken of him. The photograph of Dr. Mitra standing in front of his painting, is titled: "Mdantsane - The Sense of Freedom". We have posted photography taken by Dr. Mitra with his poem. Another image (the yellowish painting with a window), is Art by Dr. Mitra. It is art fused into poetry of Pablo Neruda. Dr. Mitra has given ILA a bit of information about Mdantsane:

Mdantsane at one time, was part of an independent country before the apartheid fell, it was called, Ciskei. The doctor had been working in the South African Military Health Service decommissioned as Captain and joined the Cecilia Makiwane Hospital in Mdantsane. Cecilia Makiwane was the first Black Registered Nurse in Apartheid South Africa. You can view artwork by the Doctor on Wikipedia of Cecilia Makiwane Hospital. He has given ILA permission to mention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecilia_Makiwane_Hospital