Response to the poem After Love
1
I learned love when you held my hand,
in back alleys of Delhi, two-long haired girls in ponytails
one swinging to the beat of radio, one swinging in the rain
of impossibilities.
2
When it showered in June my bedsheets damp
with cold leapt awake every night in thunder.
The walls sore with having to split open
and seam itself back after he took out all hinges
leaving all doors broken.
3
The tea sips itself in the cold,
after the cold begins to turn hands into glass
Today after my mother picked up the glasses from the
floor, I bent down to blow apologies that never came, into them
She held my hand while the cupboard shook
with suitcases falling to the ground.
4
I met a girl whose skin
burned with love every time I held her
I wondered how it didn't burn her
when I was soaking wet in gasoline
Maybe I still had to learn how to origami
wings of a phoenix from the tails of my spine.
5
His father hung him like a bird,
in memory drawn from flesh, on sunday
evenings he was a wooden puppet
swinging from the porch,
I can
still
hear his
call.
6
Marine Drive calls my name
with tongues of silk wrapped up
in verses of lozenges only when
I’m in Delhi. The ocean asks my
Yamuna if it’s
too late for tide?
7
I let the curtains fan the bed, the window
decides it doesn’t want to look at
my face or of the world, it paints
itself white sinking into a slumber
of no eyes.
8
The world is full of
graveyards, countries folding my love affairs
with cities I thought would welcome me.
I wake up from graves every week,
you can't stop me
from wanting all the afters.
9
The money plants in my room
have started to reach the walls,
This year I learnt how to soak
up the light again.
I wonder
now if it’s this easy to
hold my palm up
against the roof?
Now that my heart has walked back
to my body after twenty years of living.
10
You spent summers in museums,
picking up postcards for me,
I left them to burn the month after
I found your bones forcing themselves inside
of me. I grow again from tree trunks
and sew my marbled skin from scratch.
There are many ways
to be a woman.