Vidya Premkumar

Dear Sylvia,

They still write about your oven more than your orchids. They forget you peeled potatoes, that you kissed your children’s damp heads, that once, just once, you might have laughed so hard your tea sloshed over the rim of your favourite cup. 

The tulips were too red, I know. They burned the sterile white, insisted on blooming when all you wanted was silence and snow. But you saw them, didn’t you? Even as you floated, anaesthetised, away from your name, they reached in, obnoxious, alive, loud. I write to you from a time you could not have imagined, where your poems are studied like scripture, and women call out your name like a spell for survival.

You told us the woman is perfected in death. You saw snakes coiling around the cradle, and perhaps you believed the quiet beyond the door would be softer than motherhood’s raw scream. But Sylvia, the cradle rocked without harm. The world was not done with your breath. There were still rooms left for you to enter, not white, but warm. Still pages to tear your teeth into. Still hands that would have held yours even in your darkest hour.

You were not just the girl with a candle mourning her father, who was God, who was Boot, who was a bag full of God. You were not just the woman who married the storm that was Ted, only to find the thunder had hands. You were more than what broke you. You were the ache made articulate; the blood turned ink.

I have read your letters, your journals, your fury dressed in velvet metaphors, and still I wish you had written one more, just one more, where you didn’t slice the fig but let it fall whole into your palm. I want to tell you something gently, the way someone should have. Hold on. I know the air was thin and the hours unkind, but you were not alone in that dark corridor. You were loved, ferociously, messily, by more people than silence would have you believe. If you had stayed, you would’ve seen how your name became a lighthouse for others who tremble. I wish someone had told you that not all tunnels end in ash. Some open into fields, wild with violets.

With reverence and rain,
someone who still listens.

elegy—
a hive mourns
what could have been 

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About the Author

Dr. Vidya Premkumar is a poet, educator, and author of three poetry collections: Musing while Living, Living in an Indian Laputa, and the chapbook frame story. Her work has been featured in various literary journals, including Pan Haiku Review, Scarlet Dragonfly Journal, #Femku Mag, and others. She resides in Wayand, Kerala, India.

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