During a fire escape, hold people's hands and run! | Divya Gupta

THE FOLLOWING POEM WAS SELECTED IN WINGWORD POETRY PRIZE 2023 LONGLIST.

people are unmapped destinations to places enamored with anecdotes/ people are the wreckage of a collapsed building trying to build a home inside you - in the hope that you don’t refuse to offer a glass of water/ people are echoes of the discussion that interrupt your voice. the voice that evaporates, unnoticed/ people are like rocks. sometimes a healing piece of hope, other times the missing piece of a monument, and at times laying in the debris of uncertainty/ dreaming of spring, sweat, and thunderstorms all at once, people are the magnificent shades of yellow used in a Van Gogh painting/ with faceless desires in one hand and the grit of moving mountains in other, people prove every other day that rainbows were put in the sky as a personification of human dreams/ like a war zone, a field of daisies, a billowing ripple in the water, a thanksgiving prayer, the frayed end of a thread, the strength of a tungsten wire, the boiling point of water, the rebel of an unsatisfied soul, the lullabies sung for a hungry child, the antiquity of love and the contemporary of social networking – people are a museum with no theme/ there are days when people bleed and there are days when they are curing an unknown disease. on both days, people are specks of moonlight, waiting for the night sky to change its hue/ people are hues; of fragility, vulgarity, and refinement. every shade trying to fill a box labeled “cautious”/ i bet science has nothing to do with diagnostic innovations. somewhere far in the land of vague emotions, a man couldn’t let go of a person to death and revolted against the urge to make sense. people are contemporary innovations/ you may roam the world to soak the nostalgia of Delhi and the alluring architectures of Venice but listen, “people are all we’ve got. so grab the night by its nipples and go and flirt with someone” (fleabag reference)