by Arpita Roy
Of this world, I behold the wasps and the willows, the heaven upon a hamlet of smog, I behold, in the storehouses of blossoms, pollens of our past.
You offer me a deliberate slowness emanating from the conch of this world: inside, an elusive architecture of the universe. I find a word, indecipherable.
The body of your instrument is marked by neither labor, nor sweat.
Ever a vessel of breath, ever a devotee to the command of your fingers, it exists. At the end of the war, with no one victorious, it exists. At the beginning of absence, it exists. I belong, with my song of surrender, where it exists.
Here is a scripture about the long anguish of my heart:
All day, I run errands of my desire for you.
What I withdraw from this world, whether something or myself, becomes of you –
the call of geese early morning aching into the winter air, my absurd longing in a brief world languishing already, damp kisses of hues cloistered in a chrysalis of spring.
This world makes me miss you more
than I miss you by myself. When the day sets me aside,
sleep will anchor the ships of my sight.
::
Arpita Roy is an MFA Poetry candidate at George Mason University, where she is the Thesis Poetry Fellow for 2023-24. She has been awarded the Cheuse Center Travel Fellowship and the Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Award. Arpita is from Kolkata, India.
Image: Kangra painting of Mirabai, the female Bhakti saint. Date and artist unknown. In the Public Domain.
ID: Painting of Meera.
Psaltery & Lyre 
