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Shatarupa Mishra

Bloom

The ritual is done.

The harvest of tears proudly stored.

Pristine they look, with no taint of reason.

Now I let go, as I have done before.

Just this once,

let me walk with you an extra mile.

Let me brush my fingertips lightly

against your affection for the calf.

Let me sport a little

with ripples that tell you stories

in hushed tones.

Let me be windswept. I want to

taste the storms

that make your nib bleed.

 

Go. Sail your boat. Journey.

Just this once,

let me take a tear drop from you

and add it to my harvest.

If ever you touch these shores again,

I will be here with a flower for you:

a flower that grows once in many years,

if buried tears tempt the moon and stars

to spend a day with them,

beneath the earth.

The Shades of Grace

                   I

A sunless crack in a mossy wall

brings peepul shoots into the world.

Elegant, tapering shadow-leaves

tossed on the rough concrete below

nod playfully at stony, somber eyes

that spot hope coming from the beyond.

                   II

Somewhere an elephant awaits death

in a river and forgives the nimrod.

Heavy sighs soothe her unborn baby.

Dipping the bloody trunk in water,

she tastes the divine in the ripples

that restore peace unto eternity.

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Shatarupa Mishra is an Assistant Professor of English at Govt. Women’s College, Bhawanipatna, Odisha (affiliated to Kalahandi University, Odisha), India. She has an MA in English from the University of Hyderabad and she was awarded the Sarojini Naidu Memorial Trust Gold Medal by the university in 2010 for academic excellence. Her research interests include postcolonial ecocriticism, posthumanism and chaos theory. Her short story titled ‘Creation’ is published as part of an e-book: Esmeralda’s Hair and Other Stories. Her poems have been published by Erothanatos, a peer-reviewed quarterly journal on literature, Vol 4, Issue 3, September 2020.

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