Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 3, Number 2. November 2020. ISSN: 2581-7094
Snow - red
How many times
throughout the day
the thirsty Hyacinths have
dropped down their heads?
The touch of the wrinkled fingers
of the forgotten Kashmiri gardener
is afresh on the snow red flowers.
His tears of losing his land
is spun as the filament of their velveteen
petals.
He has narrated stories of Gulmarg to the
future flowers
his lost son, his little toed daughter
and his wife who had a Hyacinth smile.
Before he left,
a sigh or two
a parched throat ---
an unheard cry he carried to the grave.
The songs of the hyacinths were red sirens
echoed through a dark tunnel
breathing -
a blood smeared graffiti on the street wall.
Touch of a Dead mother
Mother was always a butterfly weed
escaping like the fantasy of splitting waves. She was the Saudade, half in
shadow, half in light, arced towards her, a topaz enamel vase. She was fragile
with a stare and smile. Sunday Morning, she was a refusal like the striped
winter carnation, a little glide through the superannuated door. Sometimes her
finest touch is felt in the dark mesh of woods meeting the unmarked strip of
light. On rare days, she walks with the lightest tiptoe on the crossroads of
leaf mould paradise. She has felt mother's softest presence while taking the
long road uphill, to drift and to be uncertain, to be the quietest in the
hustle of each sound, to climb and to fall to the vines of bleeding hearts.
The touch of a dead mother is never felt, it is stuck like a pin, safe inside the epidermis to be carried like a hidden house, with trees rattling all around and flowers meaning more than flowers. There is fear but dumb affectionate fear of pink begonia flowers.
Blooms in a moon lit night
Will you not lay the fine silk rug
of my cinnamon coloured flesh?
Will you not prick a thread from the
intricate embroidery of my blue-green veins?
Do you not long for me to be an orange
to run your fingernails seamlessly?
A wet cave to nibble -
The seeds are dispersed as spent away glow
worms in the thin dewy air.
You perform the last rituals of my body
in a moon decked night.
You unclasp the generous thigh
of the hardest forest tree
and place me.
You sprinkle soil on my eyes, face,
breast, body.
Body blooms -
Isn't it still a blossom, if not seen?