Sonnet for Man from Calcutta

1 Minute Read Time

A single round light hanging from the ceiling of a pink painted room — Photo by Sebastian Schuster on Unsplash

from The Antigone Sonnets

I’m thinking again of pink walls in Calcutta
from my cheap little apartment in Houston
that I love. I love it. A necessary repetition.
Against the pink walls and inside them
and held by them—twice—one long winter,
a man I used to love. I’ve been thinking
about him. Walls holding him. Sort of like
after the second stasimon in Antigone, when Creon
announces her mode of death—immurement
in the rock-tombs in the low hills that fringe
the plain of Thebes. I leave the apartment.
Get on a bus. We’re crossing Bute Street.
The driver scolds a woman for not pressing the stop button.
She says, Baby, I did, I did! I thought I did. Baby, I’m sorry.

Note: The phrase “the rock-tombs in the low hills that fringe the plain of Thebes” is taken from R. C. Jebb’s commentary on Sophocles’s Antigone (1900).

Aishwarya Sahi

is a poet and translator from Patna, India. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Houston and is pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Utah. Her work has appeared in Blackbird, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Recluse, and elsewhere.

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