He once said,
“the day I become the villain in your poems
is the day I will weep.”
How swiftly fate rewrites its scripts
when the sun falters.
When I was all light,
they gathered,
like sailors toward a shore
They mistook for Ithaca.
A man once told me
he loved me
For the way my presence
Made his wounds forget their names.
Some returned later
like ghosts from the underworld,
to thank me,
for loving them as no one else did,
for becoming their lost Eurydice
they could never retrieve again.
Yet why,
why did he not recognize
the miracle
while I was still among the living?
Now he speaks of other women
as if invoking new constellations
while seated beside me.
My storms,
my private tempests,
he scattered like rumor
before a stranger’s shore.
Once we spoke of words
as though they were fire stolen by
Prometheus,
of poetry as resurrection,
of childhood as a lost Olympus,
of dreams that defied gravity
like the wings of Icarus.
Now he warns me
not to embarrass him.
I wonder,
before which assembly?
Which court of hollow gods
must I now remain silent?
They say illness
makes love impossible,
that no one truly stays
beside a trembling oracle.
Yet I would have loved him
in every incarnation,
as man, as shadow,
even as the blind prophecy of Cassandra
whom no one believes
until the city burns.
Something has shifted,
A continental drift of the heart.
There is a heaviness now
unnamed,
Like the pomegranate seed
lodged in Persephone’s throat.
And he,
so easily swayed
by passing winds,
like Odysseus
lingering too long
on the island of Circe.
Tell me,
do my poems make you weep,
even now
when I cannot bring myself
to write you
as the villain?
***
Madras Courier originally ran as a broadsheet with a poetry section. It was a time when readers felt comfortable sharing glimpses of their lives through verse. If you have a poem you’d like to submit, do email us at [email protected].
-30-
Copyright©Madras Courier, All Rights Reserved. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from madrascourier.com and redistribute by email, post to the web, mobile phone or social media.Please send in your feed back and comments to [email protected]
