MK Ajay (Colours of Love and Barriers)

MK Ajay

MK Ajay has published three books of poems, including Clawing into Water’s Skin (Poetrywala, Mumbai). His collected works were translated into German by PEN Austria and published by Locker Verlag. He was a runner up in the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize and an invited writer at the Smederevo Poets’ Autumn International Poetry Festival. Ajay was born and grew up in Kozhikode, Kerala, India and currently lives in Hong Kong.

THAT, AND THAT

We fill our bodies with blue light,

are fireflies flitting inside the glass jar

of our known universe.

Encircle us, radiant pulsars, rings of planets, butterflies.

Let us join your gossip, parrots.

Let our limbs yield to gravity,

let each cell under our skins

die for another to be born,

let each circle we behold dip

into the warm crimson of our desire.

Only a thought that jumps, and skips,

and throbs along the skin of electrons

shatters this prism of the glass jar.

It breaks an eggshell in my mind,

it unsettles the placid ocean,

ripples out like a muddy tsunami.

Court stillness. Court body’s slow heat.

Court the pause between words

which parrots utter.

This then is love,

the only love

that binds mankind’s many rejections.

I am that, I am that,

Court the gospel of self, court the truth of non-self.

We watch the glass jar brighten,

the universe shimmer like fireflies.

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Colours of Love :: Setu, July 2022