# August Ache

- Link: https://writersworkshopindia.com/2020/09/11/august-ache/
- Published: 2020-09-11T18:48:37+00:00
- Author: shuktara

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**Author:** Sahana Mukherjee[⌊A sample cover of the book: salmon coloured handloom sari with gold embossed nameplate and lettering for the title and author's name. The border of the sari lines the right hand margin of the cover.⌉](https://writersworkshopindia.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/August-Ache.jpeg)
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Pages:** 68 **Year of Publication:** 2019 **Price:** Rs 200 **ISBN: **978-93-5045-
195-3 (9789350451953)

_**About the Author**_
 Sahana Mukherjee had a year-ending birth of sorts on the
31st of March, 1995. She has tried to retain all the stories she gathered from her
grandmother’s lips, but some have begun to fade away. Along the margins of every
other page in every other book, she likes to draw a bare tree right beside a tilted
home.

_**Teaser**_

_At every primal stroke_

_At every primal stroke of midnight, the heart turns paper_
 _and behind every chord
flutters a spasm of blue._

Someone writes: _Autumn teaches us to let go_. I don’t
 know what winter does. A
healthy incarceration, a loyal lobotomy, cross-border councils of love

maybe?

Someone else writes: _What’s keeping you alive_
 _these days?_

Sometimes I am the eternal enemy – at middays or
 after midnights – and sometimes
I collect away all your silences – what we have specifically lost

between us.

_A war zone is a war zone, after all; never a home_
 _that runs on loss._

Your house, you say, hides well behind the woods.
 Behind mine, the gulmohar would
stand strong if not for the world.

We’ve been betrayed as poets who made invisible
 an entire birth, and now yet so
exposed merely at a moment’s glance?

I cannot write of illegal detention camps, Federico.
 Hearts burst at borders, and
they won’t let me pass.

I have come, unannounced, to the shores of your lies
 closer to the truth than all
of mine.

These fingers, so twisted – _incomplete_ – are dust –

May the butterflies come in and make us whole again.
 May we die in winter, at last.

_**Contents**_
 42 poems