IF THIS TURNS OUT TO BE ANOTHER LOVE SONG,
it’s of no use to further stretch and twist
every pattern of doors we’ve broke open
so far. How surprising, you mutter from the bed
without looking up, and indeed, how astonishing
that language alone can build castles and mountains
and wounded people, just how my mother forces
her heart to bleed in the kitchen while she serves
dainties to the guests. It’s the afterthought
that bothers me, not the idea of - she wrote in her
wedding vows though I’m unsure how that can
co-exist with all the love and tenderness she managed
to fit in the margins and footnotes. Love, as they call it,
is an acrimonious term I’ve been struggling to unfold
from the tangled mesh of logic. For years, the only thing
I’ve found myself unable to perform is scrubbing
all the pink from my skin and turn into the Ouse.
Except no Woolf-shaped sorrow could blind my eye
from the geometry of everything I’ve found myself
surrounded with after I read my wedding vows aloud.
You, as I’d like to call you, kissing my white scars
and nursing me with enough pleasures, lovely
as the winter’s sun when we run out of another door,
our skins bruised with yesterday’s light, find ourselves
in the scriptures our mothers’ languages forgot
to build a house of. But isn’t love the same as a lore?
Isn’t a lore a woman, and a woman the final devotion?
O love, who said god is love, but not a lady
with her heart bleeding and body burned. Your love
is a hundred summer mornings in our little garden.
All it’s worthy of feeling has no title, only the music
of the pianoforte we’re yet to translate.
About the Author: Sreeja Naskar is a young poet based in India. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poems India, The Wise Owl, ONE ART, Ink Sweat and Tears, FRiGG, Gone Lawn, and elsewhere. When she isn’t writing, she’s watching sad films or talking to her houseplants.
Image Credit: Paul Klee Lovers (1920) Public domain image courtesy of Artvee
As It Ought To Be 