The Literary Review
Divergent
I’m unique like a snowflake, unique and utterly different from you in
all aspects. Like the stands of the DNA intermingled together
to create a unique me.
Walking this earth for eons and spanning the length and breadth of this
magical kingdom.I’m distinct. All the slender lines on the tip of my finger
will create a map, a unique map different from yours.
I may stem from you from the same genetic pool,
but I have different features and different habits.
A different me, a different you.
Churned out from the same concoction, if you really believe,
we all are parts of the same stardust, mixed and rolled
with varied proportions.
We are divergent but we are together as one.
I might be diverse in myriad ways but the truth is simple as a poem.
Men differ in their virtues if any, but they are alike in their vices.
- Megha Sood
Erasure
Thoughts of you are stitching an afternoon for me
longing for you has shred it into pieces—
Silence has morphed and shaped itself around me
embracing me like your strong arms
Constant buzzing of the fly
trapped between the thin wire screen
Shattered mercilessly by this boisterous gale
that has left this room in despair
How much of you has been erased from my memory already?
Who can possibly measure that?
Time itself becomes indecipherable for me
and I’m losing you by the minute
A pale yellow stock of photos thinning
with every passing minute
Saved as the triggers in my chequered box
my doctors want me to visit them as a memory exercise
A bluebird trills its morning song next to my window
a tune that I fondly remember and hum along
I see yourself in me—
standing in front of the mirror
Like a fogged memory,
waiting for thick warm hands of yours
to come and dust off the chequered box, again.
- Megha Sood
Need::Want
Hold the life with both of your sweaty palms
till it stops wriggling and warms up to you
Hold it tightly so it doesn’t fall like a fistful of sand
slipping between the cracks
Tell life loudly in its ears, you want it
more than it can ever imagine.
Tell life, you have waited too long now to be left
alone and you know the taste of loneliness.
That sour taste of the curdled milk left on your kitchen countertop
Tell life, it’s not too late cause there is always a warm nook in everybody
Tell life, that you are hungry and craving for just a fleeting touch
like a lover meeting you after a decade and you lock gaze with him
for a fleeting moment to unabashedly declare love you have been hiding
for so long, to declare it boisterously that you don’t want him, you need him.
- Megha Sood