Wishes Too, Are Protests & Other Poems — Kushal Poddar

Window - Digital Work - Miroslava Panayotova — *Window – Digital Work – Miroslava Panayotova*

Wishes Too, Are Protests

On the day following
the National Military Pride Day,
the dead men and women reincarnate,

some as the crows
on the yellow painted barricades,
and some as scavengers 
cleaning the meat they were,

but that day, when the tanks and bayonets
march like strange phallus cairns 
from a tribe soon some other will replace,    
they have more than flesh on their piths –

those dreams and dreads unfulfilled
they carried 
are reborn too. Beware of those. Billows whisper.

Spring Morning, 2021

The morning sun,

if you play with words and
whisper with still-life lips,
'Golden shower.'

swishes through your arm hair,
and inside, an unreal siren shrieks 
and squeals - Tide is coming
albeit, too late, you wreck and sink.

I hold you, also feeling erotic.

Morning, and yet the cats caterwaul.
Either they're mating 
or have seen 
what no mortal should see.

Below, in our weeds bed, dandelions
burst like suicide bombers.
Someone sneezes in our plain.

Shadow Puppets

On the unfading pillow
we lie;
hands, my hands, now
bark at the night 
spread across the walls of this room;

my daughter holds the torch; 
now my hands fly 
to join the folk it will miss - 
it always will.

What should my hands do?
My daughter moulds those 
into the rugged back of a crocodile,

and or time that devours the mountains,
or the mountains
that swells out of the sea depths.

Full Moon, Springtime 2021

The reflection of the moon at its peak 
looks like a before & after photography, 
not a pair of fake shots used for selling something, 
but one real you stumble upon in a spring cleaning. 

The water seems more smoke and less mirror 
one moment, and more mirror and less smoke the next. 
Anyway, you would have thought the scene fake, 
and yet loved to show the same to your best friend. 
You cannot do so in this virus outbreak, 
but that doesn’t explain why you do not call him, 
why sometimes coming out and staring at the lake 
is the only thing you do other than washing hands.