False Hope
By Shriya V Karnic
The wooden swing
wails in the wind
on the empty verandah,
having learned
to enshrine her,
to keep waiting
for its goddess.
As long as I
watch it,
going back before
going forth, there
might be a chance
she rustles from
the shrubs I have planted,
light-footed like a wildling,
she comes and
sits like she never left,
then smiles-
this time born
to me.
Dark Ornament
I watch her,
the slit in her door is
her sunlit silver mirror.
Putting kajal on in lines
of creamy darkness,
turning her face
to the light,
this way and that,
and where it shades,
she makes smoke
and rain. Her eyes
gleaming like
a fish under water
on a thirsty summer day.
Her gliding lines
don’t need
my steady hand
anymore, she steps back
to admire my smile
on her father’s lips.
And as they part
a gentle cracking
in my heart tells me
there is some
foolish little boy,
turning tint to taint,
kissing her figure
and letting her form
slip through his fingers
like river sand.
Then,
when she leaves,
glancing a goodbye
at me, with eyes
like a shy lioness,
I smile my mother’s fears
into warnings and hopes
on the edges of my lips
and watch the door
engulf her
and we think the same thought,
I with my mother and hers before
as we stand here and sigh—
being wanted is a tricky business,
especially having
eyes that can bend the light.
Bio: Shriya is a writer and engineer from Bangalore, India. She writes essays and poems to try to make sense of the world around her. In her poetry, she is inspired by the natural world, the unspoken human condition and simply, how the sound of a few letters on a page can capture what it means to exist and experience.
