Thirst

By Amrita Ghosh

Noiseless silver devours my body upon the return.

At dawn, I looked at the sea and went close to it,

with my dried tongue; the one that was

bronze-dark with secrets.

I gulped the salt from the breeze, rinsed the tongue with heat

of waves that crumpled up from the bottom;

as though attempting to scorn the bed-sheets of my cautious nights.

Scales of footprints on the sand

and yet, ever so longingly, they shaped to efface,

that I doubted my entire presence and everything that it touched.

And the sky that my glazed hands couldn't-

Could it be, with its gaping expanse of blue, anymore unreal?

The two crabs, to themselves seemed strangers, trembling, clinging to the moist particles of dissipation;

even they, could they be around just to stir my saliva?

I found my childhood joy - a dead seashell, still palpable

toward oblique ray, the seeping darkness of its concentric layers

complementing the hollow I felt.

It dragged my arid tongue further in.

The tired fisherman, who dragged his boat to the shore, felt the same pull.

But the coarse metallic glints made me even more thirsty, when,

the silver tentacles of the wave peered at the shallow lake beneath my foot-

On that defenseless ground, yet,

a parabolic eddy emerged to proclaim

the stake of my being.

I didn't know when I'd retracted my toes.

I didn't know when the dusk exchanged its mask or

when the moonlight's silver trundled out from my tongue,

how all thirst got buried under sea-salt

like an hour-shaped eternity!

By Amrita Ghosh