Hope is a stubborn music
humming beneath the ruins,
a small defiance dressed in dust—
it drinks from broken fountains,
keeps faith with thirst.
Life, that erratic juggler,
tosses its flaming oranges:
loss, pleasure, a stray tomorrow.
We learn to catch with burned fingers,
the skin remembering heat.
Desire pirouettes on a pinhead,
threaded to the pulse of a passing breeze.
We follow its shimmer like moths at dawn,
each wing singed by brightness
we never thought to doubt.
The world proceeds by crooked cues—
storms rehearsed in teacups,
applause where silence sits.
Beneath the racket of our missteps,
something keeps time,
a drum we don’t see.
When night forgets our names,
we set out candles anyway.
Their small flames waver,
lean, correct themselves.
We stand watching—
hands cupped against the dark—
and laugh, not from courage,
but from staying.
Above us,
the stars continue their work,
worn, uncelebrated.
***
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].
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