Sacred sorrows

These are the moments you ought not to speak of:
from the morgue of growing things 
I nurse, in whispers,
fear and erasure,
From the river, a ghost of humming violets in fists
I do something to keep them still.
I keep from a world and its tundra,
that is threadbare 
and frigid,
looking for God’s mercy everywhere;
looking for her again and again.
I do not leap or follow,
keep or awaken in the darkness,
or in the first light of the day 
breathing into my square,
as would I 
into a deep, sleeping forest.
I do not squander when there is no hope
nearby, when there is no room to wander into
in search of 
an anchor, 
a pillar,
someone to lend me a gentle hand,
some water to sink my face in.
I do not look for solace 
for the given-up, lost dreams
or dread the many surrenders of my life
with desperation, 
or wait for what I once wanted so intensely. 
I look inward and watch myself
blur indistinctly into the foliage of being; 
like a deer in the wild,
running through the woodlands, perfectly agile
and safe from the open….into the shores.
There is no ending. I am free.
Snata Basu is a writer based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Her poetry has appeared on various literary platforms including The Opiate, Visual Verse: An Online Anthology of Art and Words, and Small World City.

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