Love & Death: A Saga.

By Drishti Kedia

I’m handing my lover a knife

and laying out my heart at his feet,

my throat, his garden of red roses 

oh darling, my mother used to say,

your love will be the death of you.

But mamma, it's love. Wars have been waged, lives have been laid. Who am I?

I'm writing words of grief in black ink

on my right cheek 

and asking the world to hide it away 

with the same softness they show the setting sun,

but everyone is just a child coloring 

out of line and now my body is littered

with the remnants of memories that aren't mine.

Anger is the word that spills

from my father's cup of tea every night,

the letters falling onto my lap

like murdered bodies in god's,

and all I can do is stare and stare and stare

until my eyes are numb from crying 

and my father's are red from regret.

Denim jackets in my closet

that carry three summers and loose change

and empty perfume bottles

that spell names I can't pronounce,

I'm all but a whirlpool of that abstractedness-

My existence only in what I held-

my poetry, someone else's,

and my death in everything.

By Drishti Kedia