Love After Love

Love After Love by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Reinvention

Reinvention ~

She doesn't tell me things now,
As she looks out of the window, I wonder
what she thinks of.
It's the mystery of women, they say,
the uncovering is slow - the pace theirs.

But this was not how it was.

How is it that our closest relationships are the ones
whose stories dry up first?
We look at each other, and we see the same refrains
playing in our minds.
I say - she's silent, thats her nature - and turn away.
And the chum of a whole universe inside of her
finds its way in rashes in our togetherness.

What prevents us from new narratives?

Maybe I will share more,
maybe it will be a difference if I share first,
maybe I will disengage our comfortable grooves of knowingness.
Maybe I will reinvent ourselves.
We could then be the poetry I pen every night,
the pain shared in words, rather than silence.

Then, when we hook our arms and walk with familiar paths,
we could be far richer than the sunset we walk into.

~ words of Sunil Bhandari

If Love hurts...

Leave if your love hurts you.

Leave if it is always more pain than it is joy.

Contrary to what they’ll tell you,

Love does not make the world spin around.

You can want someone, baby.

You can want them until you’re raw.

That kind of longing can turn you into water after a live wire has been thrown into it.

It can turn you into the hand holding that wire,

But that doesn’t mean it’s right.

It doesn’t mean you should stay.

Don’t hang round just because you’re scared that you’ll never feel that kind of electricity again.

It’s not true, it never was.

The thing is, you were made to be touched by hands,

Attached to a body that finds itself at rest when it’s with you.

That finds itself quietly trembling when you’re together.

Those hands need to come with gentle words and an honest mouth.

A mouth that says your name in a way that sounds like the very definition of “falling.”

So don’t take less than that.

Don’t take half of that.

Above all, if it hurts, go.

You’ll fall in love so many times that you’ll lose count and it’ll shake you.

Tiny vibrations like tectonic plates with every stranger who you looked into the eyes and made your body feel new.

Find a love that makes you feel new, and better.

Always like you’re moving and staying still at the exact same time.

Grow, expand, and if it hurts, leave.”

– Azra. T. “Lessons #2”

moon

Meet me
under the strawberry moon.
I'll be the one
dressed like the sea.
~ Ron Wills

Shy girl

For the shy girl
with windows in her eyes,
a kiss hidden in a poem
about walking in gardens
where there are no gardens, 
but tangled paths balanced
between our yesterdays
and our tomorrows.
You're beautiful.
I won't ever touch your hand,
not until I become the wind.

~Ron Wills

I will write you letters this winter

I will write you letters this winter

I will write you letters this winter
When the snow falls and the fire crackles
I will race over those alphabets
Lingering on ones I felt
When I stood under the warm sluicing water
and you were mist across the shower of rain
I caught a glimpse of you in the golden sunlight
outside the deep green curtains.
I will hold you in coherent coincidences
And I will refuse to turn the page
I will sit with mulled words and live in exuberant summers
When the ascending spirals of smoke groan wet
Ebbing away the sensation that leaped up the chimney
I will know you were hanging on to the soot.
You were holding on and clinging to my roof.
I will look at you as tenderly as the moon
Looks at the frozen icicles that remain on the branches
When every living room will be swarming with unions and laughter
This Christmas
I will write you letters under the mistletoe
I will not proliferate or pluck my history from yours
I will let my now and then merge in yours
I will not let the distance long or throb
I will let us squeeze and snuggle into a poem
When passion will river on my soft swollen syllables
I will unfasten the violet from my ink
and spill all over you,on and again

I will write you letters till the winter ends.

~ by Poulome Mitra Shaw

My Failing Eye                                                                                                   
Debsruti Basu

There is a manner 
in which things shape up, 
inside my head. 
Like well-paved roads, 
leading to fallen houses. 

I know all the stories.
I remember them with the precision 
of how they began — 
how each eyelash dropped a lie, 
or a truth, combining the two. 

And I have my endings, 
like curtains that were once lace —
holding up the window, 
like a body of its own. 

My hands lie folded, 
on my sterile chest. 
With no children to feed, 
neither to own,          

I sleep like an old nostalgia shop. 

But you, you remember to leave this city —
leave these walls, 
this village, nameless. 
For when the shutter finally falls down, 
don’t see your face, 
for sale —
crumbling within.