Poems from Abha Prakash

 

Musings

I imagine words – long, lean, hungry --
filling your emptiness,
like so many desert blooms with outstretched arms.
They cast a shadow where your lips move
in stony monologues.
Only walls can hear
and shake invisible hands.

Can something be made
of your silence?
This threadbare blanket
hardly veils your thoughts.
They trip over the dark skeins;
run in the blanks like silver

blinded by night.
Silence may be a walled well
where screams echo
into a gathering storm.

Something survives,
sketched in secret gestures.
Your fingers work their unseen magic.
Walls listen to the moist shadows
of your mouth.

Poetry 
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Agni
Anuradha
Benny
Ela
Lloyd
Raymond
Roger
Shraddhavan
Shweta Ketu

The Believers

The prairie sky exuded more than
just picturesque sunsets that summer.
In the middle of August
night clouds parted a sudden inlet
lit with stars.

Staking our claims too fast
we flew above the earth.
The future was ours to chart; never mind
the amateur strokes
of a mixed couple in love.

Buoyantly unmindful,
we prepared to leap
from one world to another,
in the space of only one life
and seven hasty rounds around
the holy fire.

Mid air it snapped.
The voice spoke and you believed
so easily –
in another difficult odyssey
through separate worlds and time.

Transformation

It was in her thirtieth year
she touched the moon-shaped egg,
harvesting a subtle sunshine
quickening and bright.

No longer imprisoned
In the tangled mass of flesh and bones,
Her blood began to flow,
Gracefully, soundlessly-

a calming tide sweeping
the grey beach clean,
again and again,
of its dark wreckage.

Quiet

Sometimes whole mornings pass by.
Unspoken words flutter between us,
rustle under dry hedges,
fanned by the swaying casurinas.

Conversations, unlived, relived,
carry themselves across imaginary fences,
while our eyes remain shaded
beneath burdens from the past.

They do not remain quiet and heavy for long;
they speak, mainly in whispers,
shift blame, engage with forces --
that once born, never die.