Poetry & Pics: Sahu & Arya

Nandini Sahu

Paintings: Kavita Arya

Poetry: Nandini Sahu

Fluency in Silence

You dictate me the poetic lines in absentia

I am just the amanuensis to write your poems.

You call me ‘word-wizard’, but you are the art of wizardry.

The moon may teach you, it’s fine to go through phases. 

And the sun says, no matter how many times 

you go downcast, keep rising in the sundry. 

One has to consider the kind of silence one follows.

If you don’t understand my silence, how do you claim

to understand my words who are free birds that fly?

Silence is to the spirit what sleep is to the body.

Silence is healing. Right tongue comes out of silence

and right silence comes out of speech, you know why?

Silence is an ocean, speech is a river.

Meaningful silence is juxtaposed with hollow words.

Silence is the language to encounter divine.

Love, my silence is better than proving a point at this point.

The quieter I become, the better you can hear.

My fluency in silence can sort out our subsists.

In any case, you must win, I prefer to lose.

If you win, you are the conqueror; if you lose, you still are the captor.

In any case, my love, you win, silence wins.

***

Time the Quiet Witness

Times of absence, blue and dreary

clad in grief's shadowy array.

Times of quietude, witness of weary

subtle feelings of the soul, eyes teary.

There is an apprehension in the firmament, 

an aspiration of the breeze, and a movement,

the five elements are a period and a hint--

it’s sure some cause for a lover's unsound judgement.

When our ancestors are homegrown, we have to reason 

their righteous philosophies, else it would be incredible

to bear them. But when they are absent, we soothe

time for their absence by lodging on the memory of a superstition.

Love, then why are you so quiet? Your silence is

a feeble fibre that the deceitful air 

of the contagion wanes. Your speech was once so impartial.

The quiet time is the witness to our love’s labour, erroneous.

 

If what time says is true, contentment is the absence of malaise,

then I will never grasp pure joy. For I am haunted 

by a fever for consociate and experience,

I am the witness to time, the quiet witness.

***

You are Another Me

“Tread slowly love. Let’s take no burden. One step at a time.”

That’s when I knew, you are becoming another me.

You love me with a love that is far beyond love.

You remind and recap --we fit like hands and the glove.

You are another me when you love the moon

and starlit nights, and when you believe in the universe.

You didn’t ‘fall’ in love with me, we walked into it

gloriously, hand-in-hand, that was the unsurpassed move.

You are yet another me when you believe, we aren’t destined to do things 

planned for us by the universe. You rather have the conviction

that we can make things work, make things happen

the way we wish, we are the makers of this sieve. 

   My privilege is-- you are me and I am you as cascades blend

   with the brook and the brooks with the sea. Then

   the gales of ecstasy assort forever with a honied passion.

   Nobody is solitary; all mechanisms fall in place in the law of divine love.

My Muse, when you grow old, take my poetry book by the brook

and think of these moments when you wounded me with your

nonchalant stories of worldly snags and questions unsolved.

I encounter resolutions but you don’t pay attention to receive.

You will remember, how many loved your treasures, their ‘rights’,

and how many loved the pilgrim emotions in you. You will

for sure find a long queue in the memory lane on one side

and solitary me on the other. Then for me you would crave.

Till then, you are another me, and I live-love-breathe you.

I wish I could be your changing facet of life; I wish I were. 

But no qualms dearest, time is the greatest master,

time takes over all that is somber and gray, time is all that we deserve.

***

---

Setu, January 2023