Everydayness
Pigeons on the water tank sit observing dawn.
No coos, as if learning sobriety, as if in awe
of the moment. No horror settled close.
The early morning sun following the ancient
trajectory, keen to discover it forgot yesterday.
Something might appear. Though I don’t count
my fingers, I know what this humble body
doesn’t about wings and skies. Suddenly,
time is fast in its going. Feels like a thing that
wants to offer something. But I have filled hands,
succumbed to numb climate. What is good
about a life splintered from past and present?
Floundering
With you away, I want nothing from this day.
The house, silent like idle radio. The laundry line,
without the blue shirt you added in the luggage like
a last, necessary investment. The rose balsams
have blossomed. You love them. In turn, they
love rains. It rained an hour. Maybe it needed
a thing like subscription to go on like me. The
soft wind tows air detached from things in wait for it.
How unfair seems the time, for it opens my longings
layer-by-layer. A sparrow, still damp, tweets a thing
about light or wind or skies. And then flies. I stare as
it reaches a banyan branch. Recumbent raindrops come
earthward like magic. What do my senses search
for? Among the views neat inside their ordinariness,
I imagine your voice—or are they desires, singing
themselves beyond their floundering red margins?
At a close distance
I see a man pick his scattered papers blown
by the wild wind, curious about their flight.
He collects them in rhymeless manner.
The farthest first. Then the nearest. Comes
the turn of the middle. Clumsy like a crow call
responding to dusk passing through it.
Beneath the weightlessness of morning light,
I desired being schooled by him. Falling
to the music, the moment birthed. He was
calling them by familiar names. I, too, belong
to the generation deluged by movie magic.
I neared and found sketches of Keanu, Aishwarya,
Marilyn, Johnny. How easy it is to get back
what you lose if you have a name for it.
Purbasha Roy is a writer from Jharkhand, India. She came 2nd place in the 8th Singapore Poetry Contest. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly Review, SAND, Iron Horse Literary Review, and The Margins.