Touch

Touch


Yes your course palm.
It felt like mine.
As if our hands merged.


Your soft body.
Light. Dark. Brown soil.
I remember my fingers tracing every inch of it.
Even a touch is precarious.
My fingers and your body - vulnerable.
Such liable intimacy they share.
As if one is answerable to the other.


“How would it be to be held by you ?”


Your body now is like a limestone hill.
It does not echo the story of a lost river.
It remains helpless and dry.
A punishment whose essence is loneliness.
The river's footprints - An arid course now.
Let's say, transparent.


Lonely river memories.
Some on earth.
Some in air.
Floating in strange structures, forms and colours.
They vary with painful mimicry
All formed in time and effort.
These are the confession of dissolved limestone.
That a river once ran its course here.


“How would it be to be held by you ?”


Just a "touch" can break a dam
The burst of water
Flooding, roaring from a distance.
Like the cry of home coming.
A sense of belonging.
Splashing. Unstoppable.


Everything will be absorbed.
Cold water will percolate the warm ground.
Frenzied drifts and swirls.
The scent and gasp of a fresh life.
Nature will hear the pores breathe.


You'll tense like a drunken fountain.
Over and over again.
Flutter in my arms
Like a moist leaf caught in a fierce current
All pain will be washed away.
All sorrow released.


A river will be HELD by the ground.



- Sayan Chakravarty
Pune, 2008