In the Sanatorium with My Aunt
The vacant eyes of my aunt are creepily distant
It’s evening in the sanatorium and like an antimacassar,
It shrouds the debris of ruined minds.
Trapped, tormented thoughts waft out,
Smelling of rotten memories
Tendrils of a frozen past reach out and graze me with the coldness of death,
And tend to prick my sanity as if with pointed icicles...
Drip by drip all hopes drain out,
Through the sieves of time
An indefinable sense of solitude fills the void...
And I sense the squeeze of death’s talons pressing on.
Inexorable, inevitable...
Translated by the poet himself
Jiban Goswami is an Assamese writer and translator based in Guwahati. He received Amulya Kumar Chakrabarty Award in 2017 for his Assamese translation of John Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden.