1.Confusing
____________
Like the hands in confusion for what to do standing
in a queue. Or with a taco bell reference done to me
in school years. My heart too is, on how to reciprocate
the love that comes on occasions favorable for
the one showering it. The leaves have begun pave
their way back to deserted branches. Evening I
found the doorbell made no sound on pressing.
Instead of the fix it demanded, I kept it ideal. I
behaved the way, I did see the climber stretch
opposite the building's backyard. For the little
wilderness that survived the city encroachment.
I didn't disturb it's liveliness. Every night I see my
knees hold proud the childhood scars. I think about
how each has a place behind. Where my tiny body
wandered for hunt of pleasure. Public park. Woodlot.
Sidewalk. How inside each unconscious ache
a beauty lies. Again I end my day in confusion.
The first time I had seen a puddle harden I felt
heartbroken. This feeling was as large as witness
a butterfly skip my home bougainvillea. And as
small as taut bedsheet get the first crease after I
throw my handbag over it. I have no options
to choose from like a letter I wanted to scribble
upon the courtyard of sky. So, I turned myself
quiet. And began forage of a place I could keep
my awareness as a rudderless boat. An idea to
not listen to me. Nevertheless, things happen to
me like directions purposed for an unforced
migration. I become the crosswalk that refuses
outgrowth…but efforting has been a habit.
2.Broken Syllable
__________________
Like a broken syllable from where emerges
a new meaning. From the cracked cement of
verandah popped an inch long moss patch. Its
green juxtaposed against the off-white seemed
like a moment of forgiveness. A taco bell dream
that leaves me overwhelmed. Another story of
how we are blessed with breaths. This is an
unburdening like a monsoon over a field exacting
itself inside Indian thirst. How I am close to witness
something that leaves me thinking of a memory I
made on a road find a bell-shaped purple flower. Its
clapper I discovered was a yellow carpel. Like a
bright dream my body kept on hold to release in
the noon nap. It had a song and a delight framing
it. Like April hours around a lotus lake. Some
days I shimmer across my sadness. Its algorithms
weaving sunshafts and moss threads. The pattern
like an authorless boat that arrived sailing on my
island of solitude. With an unstifled sonnet at the
glass-bottom smelling an old rain I hid in pencil box
3.Poetry is here
________________
While I write this, in an Indian April summer
noon, a writer must be staring at an aspen leaf
and meditating about the mystery of its arrival.
I too had done once find a hibiscus leaf on the
windowsill, remembering there's no plant in the
entire neighborhood. Including ours. Somewhere
on a typewriter,a poet clicks thoughts with a
symphonic sound. Like an image of taco bell not
knowing, what it is. And then a silence following
it, would resume hear a goat bleat outside the gate.
Now in America where night blankets it, somewhere
verses behave obedient to a blank page. The same
sky above all, us. The sentience with equal amount
of surrender before a world hidden between this
world. A kind of longing. Each one meandering in
the sea of lexicon, to pluck word after word. How
day-after-day of selections, the words never behave
same-kind. Each verse a miracle never known before.
What is poetry in ultimateness. A way to translate
the body's and time's syntax mingling at a point
industrious in its gesture of disappearing in jet-speed.
Purbasha Roy is a writer from Jharkhand, India. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Logic(s), Romance Writers of America, The Archipelago, Mascara Literary Review, Channel, SUSPECT, Space and Time magazine, Strange Horizons, Acta Victoriana, Pulp Literary Review and elsewhere. She attained second position in the 8th Singapore Poetry Contest. Best of the Net Nominee.
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