An Elegy For Us, Bleeding Sunflowers

By Shrishti Bangera Kanekal

I turned to you as though you were my eternity,

my sun,

but your petals don’t fall on me.

My own petals blister,

golden edges curling into ash, 

a ring of fire with no warmth beneath.

I break myself into roots for you,

veins red with sacrifice,

bleeding into the soil

so you might rise brighter.

You never see it,

you call me hollow,

while I am drowning you in everything I am.

And you,

you stare at my bowed face, 

see only the shadow where my love hides.

you tell yourself I have no light for you,

blind to the way I scorch myself 

just to keep you alive.

The field mirrors us;

sunflowers blackening in the dusk,

yellow stained with the gore of our love,

a congregation of broken hearts

all turned toward a vanishing sky.

Each stalk, a spine,

each blossom, a wound,

each seed a confession

containing words we wished to have said.

We love like dead sunflowers.

Still reaching,

for a sun long gone,

our devotion dripping red into the earth.

Together we rot in symmetry,

both never managing to fix the pieces,

the pieces torn from our shattered souls,

turning our love into a withering requiem beyond repair.

And perhaps,

was it love,

or the ache of us wanting and bleeding?

By Shrishti Bangera Kanekal