by Bakul Banerjee
On the slippery stones at the edge
of the rushing river, swollen by the melting snow,
a memory of the faraway mountain, we tried
to stand still barefoot, balancing ourselves
to avoid falling over, holding onto each other.
We played games of counting white wavelets
skipping from my feet splashing onto yours.
Or was it the other way around? Was I standing
downhill from you? Without any goodbye,
you ran uphill in your long strides away from me
toward the fiery sky lit up by the glowing setting sun.
Ever since, I kept falling and falling behind
as the space between us kept growing.
The bitter taste of that moment is still on my tongue.
Days, months, and years went past. We would never
feel our hearts beating in unison or would splash
pure water to each other again. We aged, became sick,
maybe sick at heart. Burying those feelings, avalanches
from the heartache-mountain came tumbling down.
I thought they could not be recovered. You were gone.
But wait! When mimosas bloom by the river
filling the air with their sweet scents, I reach out
to you across the expanding universe, raising
my cup of love for an undefined sacrament.
Award winning author and poet Bakul Banerjee, Ph.D. published her first volume of poems, titled “Synchronicity: Poems” in 2010. For the past fifteen years, her poems and stories appeared in several literary magazines and anthologies throughout U.S. and India. She lives near Chicago and received her Ph.D. degree in computational geophysics from The Johns Hopkins University, Maryland.
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