THE FOLLOWING POEM WAS SELECTED IN WINGWORD POETRY PRIZE 2023 LONGLIST.
The emptiness of shouting out your loss,
so that once you lose the grips,
the world surrenders its weapons pointed at you.
To quiver together at the cold fall that fills the abandoned while
instigated by shrieks inside,
remembering their laugh, cry, smile, and skin-wrapped smirk,
the old scents they flowered themselves with
and the hopes they bloomed your life with.
Also, their roughness to balance for namesake and life
It's a long-held river, squirming, and ready to cover its full length,
crossed and revised by the bridge of changes and belongings.
The snippets of their memory passing through you
like the corals in the waves of the ocean,
and like the owner’s house building onto itself and its story.
But it's more of a person we care or do not care about that stays with us
like a souvenir, not in their memory
but in our stories that mingle in for retelling.
The memory remains still, but of losing.
They say that you lose people and their memories,
but you lose people and the time you could have spent.
It is the nostalgia that creeps in and not the memorized guilt.
The sandcastles you could have forged together,
the quilts you could’ve woven and knit together,
the ice creams that could’ve ended your long car drives,
and the same losses and gains you would have made together.
An unsound dream that can never be fulfilled in reality,
one that soothes your soul but cannot be addressed
as an affair to your conscience.
How paradoxical it is,
once the memories are sustained,
they also get stained by our relentlessness,
and somewhere our longing puts us in extreme pain.
It is not the one like a mother goes into labour
or a woman burning herself to death,
but the one like a flower goes through, on its broken pedicel,
like the baby elephant on the death of his mother.
Unknown of any familiar feeling,
It longs and longs enough.
Knowing somewhere that he’ll never be caressed that way,
a feeling so unfamiliar yet so close to his heart.
How embedded it is,
that of death only death could metaphorically describe it rightly.
Death, a loss which is an exception to its like,
one that rips and frills you at the same time,
it evokes repentance and absurdity at the same time,
it lights on end of life and preparations for the afterlife altogether.
So that even if one has shattered beliefs,
he can recollect and find his saviour in them,
this loss is familiar to every human breathing,
and the fear that ends with it also creeps in from a juvenile phase,
and grows a being to become one.
The meaning of life arises from the fear of death
like the meaning of love arises from the existence and fear of hate,
attachment strives due to its uncalled end.
End, meet me slow,
do not hurry this time like every time you do,
I might look strong but I’m not,
I’m the one who craves comfort in mellowed and scented arms,
showing up numb to the friendly ones.
I feel as if I understand longing and only satiable arms-
while you are one of the dizzy spectators,
who seeks a different meaning,
I sometimes wonder if this world ultimately aims for an end,
like can you please for once, forgive the rabbit for not winning it
and can you please comfort the tortoise to be victorious in any case,
irrespective of his newly found glory,
that lasts only until the tortoise remains an exhibitionist,
till the time people have an exception to their excitement
of someone who survived the death he was sentenced to,
by the lively corpses offering glory, in this place hoarding antiques,
representing the living who were born here and surprised this world,
by dying their way, again.