Pande-mourning

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You cry.
You post
A photograph
On your Whatsapp Status
You send off
A scurry of Whatsapp
Messages
To potential mourners.
You gloat
On your movability.
You write
A cathartic tribute
On LinkedIn.
You hashtag
The mourned.
You agonise over
The appropriate emoticon.
Your husband shares
Your post on Facebook.
You watch
The mourned
On YouTube.
You order a book
By the mourned
On Amazon.
Along with
A casserole.
You like a few
Tweets about
The mourned.
You plan
A long piece
Of writing
On the mourned.
And you muse
On the strange
Similarity
Of disappearing status updates
And human life on Earth.

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Ananya Dutta Gupta has been teaching at the Department of English, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, West Bengal, India, for over nineteen years now. She has an MPhil and a PhD in Renaissance English Literature from the University of Oxford and Jadavpur University respectively. Poetry and the arts continue to offer her both catharsis and conversation. She has published poetry at Muse India and Gulmohar Quarterly. A poem of hers – ‘Howrah Junction’ – was one among twenty internationally selected entries for a commemorative volume titled Global Conversations published by CRASSH, Cambridge University, in December 2021. Her debut collection of eighty poems on birds, For Tomorrow the Birds Might Still Sing (Santiniketan: Birutjatio, 2021), is in circulation now. It was also featured in a panel discussion at the recent Nabanna Earth Weekend, 2022.

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