by Vinita Agrawal
By morning, the restless sands lie in neat pleats pinched by night winds
crimped into columns, each one breathing a sun of its own.
Morning gathers the night to its bosom like a cranky baby.
Silences its sobs.
Diverts the mind from dreams to reality;
to earth – now freshly dressed in a pleated skirt of orderly sands.
It unites darkness and light, flour and ants, grain and birds
swabs and wounds, thirst and ponds, fresh blood and old pulse beats.
Renews wonders – how perfect strangers meet
and then cull friendships from the empty air of extended palms.
How faces, never seen before, enter our wombs
and slice our hearts with their first cry.
How, when we sing, animals listen and plants grow.
How the sight of eggs in abandoned nests crushes us with sorrow.
And how, when we stumble upon stumps of axed trees,
we are hacked by the pain of something precious snatched away.
Morning is like a tree…tall and straight when it starts
until it gets tangled in its own branches as the day goes on.
Vinita is a Mumbai based writer and poet. Her poems have been published in Asiancha, Raedleaf Poetry , Wordweavers, OpenRoad Review, Constellations, The Fox Chase Review, Spark, The Taj Mahal Review, CLRI, SAARC Anthologies, Kritya.org, Touch- The Journal of healing, Museindia, Everydaypoets.com, Mahmag World Literature, The Criterion, The Brown Critique, Twenty20journal.com, Sketchbook, Poetry 24, Mandala and others which include several international anthologies. Her poem was nominated for the Best of the Net Awards 2011 by CLRI. She received a prize from MuseIndia in 2010. Her debut collection of poems titled Words Not Spoken published by Sampark/Brown Critique was released in November 2013. Her poem was awarded a prize in the Wordweavers contest 2013.
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