
By Pervin Saket
In The End What Separates Us
In the end what separates us,
Are not the words we hurl in cannonball pain
Or accusations posing as impassioned interrogations
But the foetal moments we keep shuttered
Too closeted, too crouched
Too tender to look the sun in the eye.
.
In the end what separates us,
Are not distinct childhoods of city and scenery
Rivers turning into chasms, and bridges morphing into borders
But cloistered ghettos of right and good
Too squelched, too certain
To dance in the flickering twilight of wonder.
.
In the end what separates us,
Are not careful plans of distribution and dissolution
Somber clauses in reasonable, measured jargon
But hope forbidden, unable to transcend
Today, tomorrow
To unite our separate stories and their sovereign griefs.
.
Thresholds
The one thing we’re united about
is how to tell the children.
Gathering them on an evening hung and heavy,
we measure out the practiced phrases,
and bore keenly into their expressions.
But they shrug off our grimness;
they have always known.
My children have already seen me
standing at the door,
all dry-eyed and combed
(the strain mustn’t show)
fidgeting with the car key
and planning how to squeeze my world
into the week allotted for me.
.
Pervin Saket is the author of the novel ‘Urmila’ and of a collection of poetry ‘A Tinge of Turmeric’. Her novel has been adapted for the stage, featuring classical Indian dance forms of Kathak, Bharatnatyam and Odissi. Her work has been featured in ‘The Indian Quarterly’, ‘The Joao-Roque Literary Journal’, ‘Paris Lit Up’, ‘The Madras Courier’, ‘The Punch Magazine’, ‘Cold Noon’, ‘Earthen Lamp Journal’, ‘Breaking the Bow’, and others. She is co-founder of the annual Dum Pukht Writers’ Workshop held at Pondicherry, India.
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3 replies on “Two Poems”
Very nice poems, I loved it
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very fine poems by Pervin Saket
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Lovely poems!
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