Four poems for the Poetry Salon by Pooja Garg

 

Snow postcards

It is difficult to tell you of snow on the phone
Where I sit in the window, it is hard –
The fall,
The falls

–

I think the moon perches on that twig for a reason
comparing whiteness,
comparing notes and that time
when they both will melt away to
Something dark and
Reduced –

–

Silence is also snow
Most days it seems like the soul – so white
and some days,
Almost eternal

–

All things are relenting in their color for snow
as they become white,

become clones
Their shapes however remain –
Unbent and
Unchanging

–

Spring seems so far away, like death –
On days like these, it is easy to believe
one will go on
Non molten and
Non red

–

I wonder what snow will melt into –
Not into slushy water, no
What does something indestructible become
(when destroyed) ?
Is malleability a property of the soul ?

–

Do I love snow ?
Yes. As much as one can love
A white lie spread so thick you have no choice
But to believe it

 

Approaching Winter

Perhaps we knew we were headed for
winter, perhaps we knew this was our last summer
For why else would we
insist on taking the boat out to the sea

To see the dolphins he had said
And I had followed. That’s the way it had always been
He crested, I lay low

It was late October when he called again. Said he was out on
a long haul flight. To catch the sunrise on South China sea
I imagined him cresting somewhere on a cloud

And as my mind hit a turbulent patch,
It was easier to think
Of parachute drops, of landings in summer fields

Of that which kept us safe together and that
Which didn’t –

 

River

Somewhere between your tempest
and my undoing, we found yellow
and stability – they stayed

We were happy the sun was
always up, we learnt to make love
with our eyes open

My body was a temple you said
and left red flowers on bedsheets
each night

I was never the deity
but you were always
the God

I shivered like water in moonlight
each time you called my body a river
I gushed, I flowed, I ran blue

I would run now
if you let the floodgates open
but you don’t

Because you know that rivers
only ever run one way
And that is away –

 

Poet for an afternoon

Time is too much loose change
rasping in my pocket –

I save these pennies for
your thoughts, for these
primrose afternoons when

Yellow faded curtains let
stillness expand over the sky in
a confusion of bloated hope

And let moments fall in my lap
like a poet’s words
So full of themselves

And yet so empty –

For Pooja Garg, her words are incidental and even writing feels noisy. She prefers quietude. And yet she has been writing as far as she can remember. She loves to explore the themes of time and space in her poetry where love and loss, the everyday and the eternal come together to voice her innermost experiences. She is a feminist by surprise – as she grew up, it was surprising to her to know that world was different for women and that led her to write poems about that. A communications professional and abuse volunteer, Pooja loves conducting Poetry as Therapy workshops. A communications professional, Pooja is Founder Editor-in-Chief of The Woman Inc. Pooja has a collection of poems to her credit called Everyday and Some Other Days. Chosen by Eclectica as the Best of Poetry in the last 20 years, Shabana Azmi called her poems, ‘very moving and a must read’.