How To Write a Poem?

By Shristi Singh

(How do you even write like that? So beautifully! I answered-)

To pen a poem,

Begin in the hollow where dusk cradles the moon,

a silver sliver in the breast of the sky,

where silence murmurs secrets in a language known to few

this is the womb where your verses will bloom.

Now collect tears from the moon’s own sombre cheek,

Capture the sigh of winter’s empty streets,

And blend in the ash from love letters burnt.

Inscribe with a quill plucked from an angel’s wing

dip it deep in the inkwell of your sorrows,

And write on parchment of yesterday's despairs,

sketch a heart, and then cross it out—

for every poem is a love letter

never sent, always torn out.

Lay down words like placing roses on fresh graves,

each petal a whisper of what you cannot scream.

Frame your fears in the guise of a sonnet,

and your sighs in the curves of a couplet,

half-hoping the rhyme can contain the chaos.

Metaphors, those silent wolves lurking in thick,

Bare their teeth in the soft neck of your thoughts.

Then, most importantly

defend the moon like your own child.

A lone beacon

In an endless night, misunderstood,

Glowing not with its own light but reflecting another’s,

A perennial prisoner to its solitary cycle.

At last, you'll always suffer with poems incomplete,

A line too short, a rhythm missing beat,

Like prayers without amen,

a bridge built halfway over an abyss,

where thoughts turn back, afraid to cross

to where meaning ends and feeling begins.

Excuse me,

But, were you ever complete, you whimsical cheat,

Or just fragments artfully made to compete?

By Shristi Singh