Yesha Shah

Skimming Stones

They no longer have room for your poetry after you die. It is sent along with heaps of old newspapers to the scrap dealer down the lane. Tattered, it lies in that tin-walled shanty amid rotting wooden furniture, stacks of dysfunctional box-television sets and rust crusted refrigerators.

The late-autumn breeze which sends hordes of dry leaves cart-wheeling sets a few poems adrift too. Those bits of you cross the dusty playground where obstreperous boys play cricket barefoot and end up at the roots of a Gulmohar. Yes, the one with vermillion flowers blossoming in bunches during spring. The one which always made you stop and marvel.

Come summer and a koel perches upon it, a throat full of longing. That song falls into the ears of a twin-soul and evokes poetry. That is how this goes on. And on . . .

varnish fumes . . .
tearing heartache
along the perforation