It races over the Bay of Bengal.
It charges through river, paddy, and city.
From Boston in my WhatsApp to family in Calcutta,
I speak of Arfan.
Perhaps Irrfan slipped into my fingertips,
one soft vowel nudging the other aside.
Irrfan Khan, recently passed,
remains in the Namesake
where he travels continents to tell the story of how
the wind- fluttered pages of Gogol in his hand,
emerged from under a train wreck and
became a signal.
And rescuers pulled him into a second life
from a womb of hot steel.
So that I will misspell Amphan, spun off the Thailand coast,
and meaning Sky.
Click here to read Krishna Lewis on the origin of the poem.
Image:Â “My City, My Joy” by Dipanker Dutta, licensed under CC 2.0.
Krishna Lewis's writing has appeared in Transition, a Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora; the Blue Nib; One Sentence Poems; Pangyrus; and Right Hand Pointing among other publications. A lapsed literature professor, she now happily serves as an administrator at a major university in the Boston area.
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