Lit eZine Vol 8 | p-10 | POETRY | Of What Could Be

SHORT POEMS

OF WHAT COULD BE
Short Poems by Sreekanth Kopuri

A LONGING FOR COMPLETENESS

In the russet haze
a swarm of mosquitos
temptingly crown around 
my undone hair; a halo
of my mother's soft voice. 

The cold sea breeze 
tries to negotiate
with the unbridled fury
in the words of my poem
that feels the birth pains
of what the void of my years 
missed in a stranger's hands 
frozen by a self-made emptiness.

My tongue longs to become
the weight of the fire in the
noontides that crash for 
a language without the dead
shells or the broken shafts
of a fisherman the furious 
sharks nor the midnight 
thunderstorms couldn't fight.

SOME FLICKERING LEFTOVERS

When a memory drifts from 
the unknown like an old melody 
along the emptied streets of a 
Sunday evening into an abandoned 
solitude of my desert-floored room 
that scents of old books striving 
to push one another like my toddling 
little daughters that quarrel to win 
my cosmic hug; I gather the tattered 
hope knotted in my weakening nerves 
for some new footprints into a road 
not taken because somewhere a home 
always stretches hands to feed the 
starving heart and fill the light in 
the eyes within, that burn with the 
cold flames till they feel the warmth 
and silence of the nestled pigeons 
and sparrow-twitters; while I still 
burry the deep waters of my soul 
in the nostalgic folds of my mother's 
prayerful fragrance, her old sari emits; 
the bright pencil marked voices in 
her diary await me to lead towards 
an unblinking light of eternity.