Debmalya Bandyopadhyay
Fisherboy
A boy is fishing on a lake. His eyes
are cast wide over the water
like a fishing net. The water is punctuated
with mackerel finned clouds,
its wet refrain his hourglass.
A boy is at the lake and a fishing pole is dangling
around his mouth; not quite danger but the idea of danger
dormant in the wind’s saline swerve.
Two old tunes shimmer in him
and he chooses both – the bait
and the hook, each becoming
the other. His heart keeping absence
like an abandoned sandcastle,
its chambers calloused like a father’s hand
shuffling sand in his hair. The father
asleep in the lake and the lake wide awake
in him, the waves dribbling at his
feet with soft Hallelujahs.
This is the past: a flooding.
This is the lake: a flatbed.
And this
is the boy: undissolved, unflinching
in his twin songs, hunger
murky in him like algal bloom.
This is when a fish
crowns over the water’s
crescent in a slow arpeggio and home
is a now a tide breaking low;
the resolve,
the tug unwavering
from his fishbone hands.
Salt-washed, pearl-eyed, the boy alone
knows this is pride foaming up at his shore
like a gale endured,
like a crescendo conquered,
its thudding cowered to
his own name, his own name, fisherman.
Debmalya Bandyopadhyay
Debmalya Bandyopadhyay (he/him) is a writer and mathematician based in Birmingham, UK. His poems, translations, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Couplet Poetry, Sontag, The Bangalore Review, Propel, Anthropocene Poetry, The Hooghly Review, CounterClock, and Spacebar, among other literary journals. He is a finalist for SweetLit’s 2024 Poetry Prize. He can often be found in parks confabulating with local birds.