Poems ::
Smriti Choudhary

Smriti Choudhary

god and Revenge

god,
I will not capitalize G.
You don’t deserve that.
They told me to believe
But it would be funny
If I believed in
The omnipresent
Omnipotent
god
That plays revenge games.

They told me to pray
At your feet, and I didn’t
And is that why death
Is closing up on me?
But you cursed an entire
Nation, that was hell-bent
On building temples
To your name.

You left no survivors
Of grief.
You play revenge games
Even without something
To avenge. So call me
An atheist. A godless world
Is so much more beautiful
With or without meaning.
At least then, you’d know
An omnipotent
Omnipresent power
Isn’t hell-bent on building
Graves to your name.

A Long Sentence About Long Sentences

They tell me that my sentences are
too long to be read in a single breath,
and in this kingdom of monosyllabic answers,
they call me the recluse,
the witch who lives over the hill
in a petrifying hut and
never uses full stops in her dark spells
that are never the answers,
only questions,
but how do I fit the whole image
of a world crumbling inside out
with the intestinal curvature
of my brain dissipating into a void
that has its gate sealed shut by dried out tears
in four-word statements
because no one in this world
can possibly caste spells cataclysmic
enough to prevent the solar system
shaped atoms in my body,
which also make up almost everything else,
from disintegrating until they reach a point
where the fragments of these atoms
have stopped existing because
cutting off an aching ear is the only way
for all the voices to stop,
and English doesn’t have enough words
to describe the questions that
flatten out the mind,
and I wonder if only English was
agglutinative, I could join
seven different words that mean
seven different things
to make a single word that would
precisely describe the grief
that comes after grief,
the morning when the gnawing moment
is forgotten but remembered again,
but English doesn’t work that way,
so I write really long sentences
to talk about one word that should have
existed but doesn’t and if
my long sentences make you
run out of breath just reading,
think of how often
I take in a breath when I write.

Sylvia

Sylvia.
I’ve been writing for eleven years,
Known you for eight, but
Loved you beyond the womb.
I wrote for you, about you
Remembering you
Around you, tried writing like you
But never wrote to you.
I cannot write to you.
Are my words worthy enough
To be read by the
Queen of revelations
Of dirty secrets of
The human mind herself?
Definitely not.

Do I know
You enough, to tell you
That I, like yourself, cannot
Stop looking at poetry
Like a confessional box
The world standing behind
The curtain, listening ardently
But never pulling me
To the other side?
Definitely not.

Do I despise
You enough, to curse you
With the knowledge
That your melancholy
Did not leave
This world when you did
That all your ache was
Packed into boxes, and shipped off
For the rest of us to carry on.
Definitely not.

Sylvia.
You don’t know me
And maybe, I will never
Never know you.

But sometime between 1963
And 1999, a little box was
Shipped to me, and I
Still don’t know what to do with it.
So I just carry it around
Everywhere I go with my words.

●●●

Smriti Choudhary is a young poet. She can be contacted at choudharysmriti9@gmail.com 

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