Two More Poems by Sreekanth Kopuri

THE SOLDIER’S WIFE

She is wrapped in the purity of 
a bone-white sari
forehead bare
hands disbangled

eyes emptied of sleep, darkened 
with sooty half moons below
try a word with his unfading smile 
hanged on the wall

a sea of despair trickles down
drenching the meanings of her past
and the hidden suns of the future.

The reminiscent voices of her lost soul
pound the breath of hope 
suffocating the debris of 
tragedy in the engulfing darkness, 
where the hands of her deprivation 
burry the last dawn
as the eternal sunset sets in. 

Two kids!
one still at breast
the other at the kindergarten 
haunted everyday with the question
“where’s your dad?”
on the weekend parents’ meet.

The government paltry sum, her bread,
body the space,
children the solace,
mirror the reflection of time
in the narrowness of sultry void. 

The other day the nation
honoured her Paramveerachakra,
a perpetual barb of distinguished honour.

Fate’s artful hand
drew her down
into a wary future.

Today he’s a grand memory 
a helmet-headed gun 
on a tomb of his body and

she’s a half  drawn 
distorted sketch of silence
abandoned by an invisible artist, who
contemplates an apocalyptic erasure.




TALK TO SILENCE

a time to keep silence, and a time to speak
			Ecclesiastes 3:7

for we are only those 
fleeting echoes strung 
by its luminescent hands, 

those cricket-chirrups, 
no more when its eye
breaks the darkness. 

As the tired hands 
of the Earth’s clock
also long now to hold 

its hand, let meditations
melt, down our eyes 
day and night into that 

sublime tree, the 
unbroken branches 
of which bore our 

stinking nests. Let’s eat
the bread of that dead 
wheat grain in the Earth

to live, and our breath
stick like magnetite to 
become one, anew, so

talk in the midnight
sack-clothed to gather 
its light till words are 

emptied out of flesh 
and suffused into it 
at the estuary of that 

communion where
meanings are born 
again as microscopic 

scales of its light from 
weird pupation, flitting 
for its enlightening nectar.