Megha Sood (Colours of Love and Barriers)

Megha Sood

Megha Sood is an Award-winning Asian-American Poet, Editor, and Literary Activist from New Jersey. Recipient of 2021 Poet Fellowship from MVICW, and National Level Winner 2020 Poetry Matters Project. Poetry Editor for journals Mookychick(UK), Life and Legends (USA), and Literary Partner with “Life in Quarantine”, Stanford University. Author of (“My Body is Not an Apology,” Finishing Line Press, 2021) and Full Length (“My Body Lives Like a Threat”, FlowerSongPress, 2022). She blogs at https://meghasworldsite.wordpress.com.

Love Is Nothing but an Elegy for Acceptance

We all long for a fairy tale sequined with a kind-hearted prince or princess

an enchanted alchemist—

brimming with love and passion, 

magically turning our sparking dreams into pure gold.

We all dream, eyes open wide while growing in our soft porous bodies, 

ready for those puny dreams to take hold.

When our desires are judged by the sex 

that rests between our supple thighs.

A fervent desire for acceptance with hunger—

when our existence cannot be validated 

beyond the binary and everything else is damned.

Your name sits like sin on my tongue 

in this socially demarcated society

living by the cookie-cutter rules.

My desires frayed and bleeding at the ends 

trying to fit hard within the mold.

Love is nothing but an elegy for acceptance. 

And yet I stand here, waiting for my own,

standing at the crossroads of life, judging me.

I with knees pressed against the concrete in a church pew

apologizing for my own frail existence.

With soil dowsed by the tears of our existence, 

tears of our survival:

I always wrap the color of my wound around my heart 

as it catches shine from a kind sun.

Love was always folklore to me; a soothing lullaby, 

a hushed prayer, told by my granny, 

as she bravely witnessed the pain of generations jumping hoops. 

Living life nothing but a farce, 

a menagerie of corrugated desires, 

Though I stayed put.

When the choices of my life were foreshowed 

by the jagged heart and cold shoulders

I always ran blinded by my sense of false comfort.

Flash forward, and here I’m standing tall and proud like an old oak 

in the thicket of the night

as a witness to my years of survival.

Trying to scrape the knife wounds 

on my thick skin made by ignorant hands

Those hands, swelling with the pride of false ownership.

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Colours of Love :: Setu, July 2022