Sunday Poem By Roja Sinha

A Quiet Surrender to Life

Stars blossom in the branches of a barren tree and jasmines bloom in the night sky.
A thousand miles away, you tell me you cannot feel anything, not even sadness to your mother’s illness.
Further away in a crowded street, I feel too much of everything. For everyone. That stranger’s pain tears my heart apart.
Why do I always fall in love with everything that is wrong in the world’s eyes.

Someday I’ll stop being afraid. Someday I’ll tear apart the curtains I’ve hung to not see the bleeding and the wounds. Somehow I can still feel the pain that I try not to see. Hiding it doesn’t make it go away.
I smiled while waving you goodbye for that’s how I wanted you to remember me, but my heart has never stopped weeping since then. Mostly it’s a quite and suppressed but on too many nights, it bursts open like a never ending monsoon. In the quite hours of afternoon when the house is asleep and the sun light is slowly fading, I think of you. Maybe the ray of sunshine is only so beautiful because I see you through it. Maybe chaos are still bearable because I’m the crowds, I hope to find your face and that’s what gets me through the noise and claustrophobia. My invisible lover, you are always by my side. How far you truly are but every time I smile or cry, I do it because you witness it, maybe just in my imagination, but somehow, in some ethereal way, we are still always together like childhood friends, secretly, forbiddenly in love.