Living
I cook, I eat, I sleep, I wash, I work, I touch.
I meet.
I linger.
On and in the grim and the lit.
A flooded tunnel, a horse helming
a carriage parked on the side.
The plants shed roots when I toil.
The mud holds the damp in the air
like they predicted butterflies flitting
away in powdery desolation.
Pruned leaves make a pattern.
There will be no revisions,
or recklessness.
Perhaps predestined Savannahs.
Amen.
The last thing
The last thing I took of you was a recording of you breathing,
heaving in varying amplitudes of the worlds inside you.
No depth could be left unexamined.
Remember our twenty-year plan.
Dams can be reversed,
catchments abolished.
Yet, the red in the heart
pounding its tune
and crumbling
next to your stream of consciousness,
remains unaltered, stubborn even.
Or did it lighten – my memory fails me.
The last thing you left me was a piece of upturned earth.
White, mud-less.
Remember this vantage point.
The earth seems navigable, I think.
Gravity trickles down into my eyes,
they feel heavy.
Where are we after ten years?
Between the pouncing silence of these metaphors.
What is a better word
for a thing best left untouched,
un-upturned.
What is a better word
for things that never were.
Reincarnation
I assured them that reincarnation is not an option,
that I would not return, here, or anywhere,
that this where even butterflies come to die.
I come back home, and assess the situation.
It is not an after.
It is what fills bodies, and returns in different forms,
folded wings, and the same flutter that promises to die,
yet does not.
A here and a now, is what it is. A circle that refuses to close.
We will meet again, and irreconcilable differences shall promise to die,
but will not.
I better tell them I changed my mind.
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About the Author
Kalyani Bindu is a postdoctoral research fellow at NIMHANS, India. She works at the intersection of genetics, neuroscience, and systems biology. Two Moviegoers was her first poetry collection. Her poems and essays have appeared in Fauxmoir, 45th Parallel, Indian Express, New Asian Writing, Guftugu, and elsewhere. She served as a poetry editor at Variant Literature Journal. As a columnist for White Crow Art Daily, she penned articles exploring various socio-cultural themes.
