LETTING GO
They tell you one must learn
to let go to remain sane.
What they miss out telling
is how much it takes
to forget and let go people
who make a whole city in your life.
A city that is not home
still, the only home you know;
A home that consumes
and yet the only place that sustains you;
A sustenance that holds
but offers no release.
When you have lived
long in such a city,
your hopes are entangled
with the unyielding forces
of knots
difficult to untie.
THE OFFERING
I despair
when things don’t go
as I planned.
I forget
to breathe,
and lament
the spaces around
for smothering me.
I forget
time is as mercurial
as the fancies of my mind.
I forget
it only takes
as much warmth
as that bestowed
by a weak winter sun
to step out
and begin
from the beginning.
RESILIENCE
(after 'Window' by Naomi Shihab Nye)
Resilience makes itself every day
appear from unexpected places.
We are shown in abundance
if we stop to notice
amidst the muddle
beget by ordinary ordeals.
A shoot
emerging from the stem
of a withered plant in your balcony,
long after you thought it had died
because you forgot to water it for months,
tells you life clutches
tightly after all.
And pushes forth with might
through everything it is denied.
Rakhi Dalal writes from a small city in Haryana, India. Her work has appeared in Kitaab, Scroll, Borderless Journal, Nether Quarterly, Aainanagar, Hakara Journal, Bound, Parcham and Usawa Literary Review.
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