She wore a marigold in her hair
She wore a marigold in her hair
-the country bumpkin amongst flowers
its artless, summery grin
trying to add a sparkle
to her fickle pansy smiles.
Once she'd worn orchids
braided in those silken depths
in exotic swirls of perfumed poetry,
when herself a lyrical sigh gazing at life
with wide almond-eyed naiveté.
She is a fistful of words
that she sings in fractured lines,
her croon a stilted echo of the obsolete
its fragments glued by self-concocted phrases~
just to hear vestigial vocal cords
croak out strings of hollowed syllables.
Her existence bracketed between
grocery lists and petty dinner table woes,
whistled urgency of cooked meals
the only noise bursting into her daydreams,
she whispers comforting words
to herself just to fill the emptiness
that yawns betwixt
clothesline trysts in the sunshine
and sleepy lullabies crooned
to the howling crib at midnight,
while her fragile sleep is
oft lulled by snored indifference.
Love is like wallpaper
carefully chosen and then just existing~
a dried rose once treasured
within sepia pages of mottled reverie.
It is revived at times in echoed smiles
or a softly whispered peck on eroded cheeks-
a firefly kissing fate-lines on palm
before twilight loses
its transient grasp on acrylics
and night intervenes...
She murmured her angst to the silence…
Sorrow: found herself
a fistful of metaphors in ~ tempest smudged skies,
a deer in deserts chasing mirages,
a bruise staining an ache,
colors erased by twilight’s washcloth,
rain-withered rosebuds,
a festering cry of barren womb,
vacant eyes of orphaned innocence,
autumnal penury of deciduas,
tarnished December sunshine.
Sorrow: is the season
~ a lingering shadow; a fragile sigh
between russet autumn
and laughter of a summer cascade.
The murmur of a dream losing itself
in concentric ambiguities
of onion-skin slumber.
Sorrow: a whisper between
flimsy winter mists, its
gloomy syllables voiced by snowflakes,
falls in commissure between night and dawn
when even stars have dozed off
and the moon is fading away.
Sorrow : the grit left after joy slips away;
the sigh gasped when helium balloon
of transient bliss escapes~
a floating bubble bursting into soapy sprinkles—
just another face
of emptiness, loneliness, longing…
Dr. Smita Sriwastav is an M.B.B.S. doctor with a passion for poetry and literature. She has always expressed her innermost thoughts and sentiments through the medium of poetry. A feeling of inner tranquility and bliss captures her soul whenever she pens her verse. Nature has been the most inspiring force in molding the shape of her writings. She has published two books and has published poems in journals like the Rusty Nail ( Rule of Survival)and Contemporary Literary Review India (spring lingers),four and twenty, Paradise Review, Literary Juice, Blast Furnace and many more and one of her poems “Unsaid Goodbyes” was published in an anthology called ‘Inspired by Tagore’ published by Sampad and British Council. She has written poetry all her life and aims to do so forever.
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