Bio
Dr. Ajanta Paul is a poet, short story writer and literary critic from Kolkata, India who has been in the academia for the past 30 years. She has published in literary journals including Spadina Literary Review, The Pangolin Review, Poetic Sun, The Punch Magazine and The Statesman. Ajanta was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2020.
Ajanta Paul
This Map is Old
This map is old
and not to scale,
Its tattered edges
like the frayed ends
of stories straying
from the main narrative
slope away into subplots of silence,
charts of search and loss.
That town, so loved, is gone
and the river, once full, is dry,
those known boundaries, redrawn
in a cartography forlorn.
This map is old; its distances fold
into the creases of coordinates
which do not uphold
the world as one knows it.