An Unfinished Reply

An Unfinished Reply




1


All these years
your letters had defined my world.
Its sentences were my landmarks,
its alphabets my moorings.
Like the best of sailors
I was afraid I'd be lost
without them
and even as I travelled away
from their sphere
towards you the mapmaker
I hung on to one of them
afraid of the unfamiliar darkness at sea.

But there was no darkness,
there was no chasm.
There were no sparks either
only a quiet glow that we celebrated
in ways that we had not foreseen.

2

How could I have known that
your beauty would be like
cloves on my tongue,
sharp and paralyzing.
Every time you laughed
my tongue would struggle to
free itself from the silken net of
your words,
while mine crumbled like
dry palmleaves.

Blame me, then, for not having answers.
Understand that despite the ache,
blind to the dryness,
I tried to linger on, yearning
to be the foam as
the wave recedes.

And if I am quiet now
it is only because I am not sure
which sands those were
which wave the last one.