Vinita Agrawal, India
I Tell The River That I Shall Pray Again
For years I've been trading promises with God.
Offering flowers for mercies,
fasts for protection,
money for more wealth.
And now, it’s not as if I've stopped praying,
but something's muted over the years.
When I fold my hands at the altar
I'm thinking the flowers in the vase
need to be changed,
the brand of incense leaves too much ash,
the silver needs polishing, the frames need dusting.
Cremating you
and returning to the raven blackness of our home,
I fastened the urn of ashes
to a clothesline outside the house
because it was bad omen to carry it inside.
Nothing epitomises waiting more
than a boat on the shore
or an urn of warm ashes
tied to a tree or a clothesline.
The river is the end to the wait,
the final quencher of thirst.
Tonight I lie porous.
Tomorrow the river will consume the ashes
and fill me with prayers again.
Grieving
Rivers rounding stones, your memory barbing
my eyes, the last moment
at the hospital clinging to air
beaded with monsoon rain at the windows,
your breath like prints fading
the mist of you alive.
Sunny-side-up-years glistening on us.
Togetherness is so fragile. For dinner
I eat scrambled nights, shoving them around
the plate of solitude. Good you’ll never know
hunger now. At the mountain retreat last month
they taught me to let go. Don’t destroy your body,
they said. I cropped my gaze to my knuckles,
felt the icy wind’s rasping ire. Don’t I know how
short patience is with grief? My flight back home
in a rain-drenched craft, bobbing and heaving
like months of the year, finally landing into
a golden afternoon. The weight on my face
responding to light. Fleeing like everything
I’d ever held. Grief, a pleasant friend,
sheepish for always knocking.
Which of my bones lets it in?
Vinita Agrawal is an award winning Mumbai-based author of four books of poetry including Two Full Moons, The Longest Pleasure, The Silk of Hunger and Words Not Spoken. Her work has been widely published and anthologised in Asiancha, Constellations, The Fox Chase Review and elsewhere. She has read at various book fairs and literary festivals like the FILEY Book Fair, Merida, Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, Lucknow Literary festival, Cappuccino Readings and Women Empowerment events. She is on the advisory board of The Tagore Prize and can be found at her website www.vinitawords.com.
