Written by Ayush Banerjee
You are the storm
that I can make peace with.
I have been dreaming about you
for so long,
under the relentless summer and chilly winters,
for you have always been the pillow
where my mind rests
where your swift body blends into my ocean,
where I can feel the warmth I’ve lacked forever.
You’re like the holy water that bathes the shrine
blissfully ignored by mankind.
I’ve been the brook without hope,
without a definition,
a constant flow through cracks and crevices;
you are my desired catharsis,
draped in dead lillies of the earth
hand picked from the ground
by the blind,
I’ve admired your skin,
above all the dirt,
I felt like I’ve latched onto you
for so long.
Your eyes,
a mistletoe;
they’d make me wish
of a parting kiss
slowly wipes the dirt of bad dreams on my lips
and when I see my reflection in them,
boy,
I wonder why I have always hated me so much.
I’ve found myself,
whenever,
like the unwilling disturbance to mankind,
honey,
Oh! how tenderly
you’ve rescued them from
the madness they see in me
restoring faith in the hopeless
and stroking my hair, gently,
with those fingers,
those very fingers,
once afraid to stand up for themselves,
restoring the faded belief in my eyes.
You’re the amiable rays of a winter’s sun,
caressing parts of me
often shivering with insensibility
for a while.
I’ve been the feeble boat,
cast away into the sea,
bearing the poison of self-loathing-
wild termites for the wood
and insecurties for the mind;
a bleak ray of light
I see on top of my wounded plank
and there appears Selene
observing my anguish,
for even the clouds of Erebus
felt feeble against the saviour’s care;
and there I saw you again
like the faintest light
at the end of the darkest tunnel,
only for me to accept
my gentle scars and my fierce battles
I often fight within me.
I’ve been lying around
as the grave without grief,
skin as strong as the hardest wood
made of the most resentful goodbyes,
until you had visited the grave
and a broken daisy keeps me company,
tries not to fix the flawed and broken,
you, too,
shall never define
what is alive and what is dead.
And honey,
if only,
I could tell you
that I have tried so hard
to be the leaves of affection
bearing eyes that admires
your battles with the cold,
if only,
someday those leaves
could rest your rays of warmth and vigour
for sometimes a dying hope, too,
deserves to be rewarded.
And honey,
if only,
I could treat you
as you are to me,
if only,
I could be half the man
that you deserve,
I would wish to be
a withered tree
that’d preserve the memory of you,
held within the feeble branches
that had to let go of their leaves.
You’re the handwritten letters
that I fear to read,
for it’d be my greatest sin
to define you.
I’m forever grateful
to everything that you are
and all that you ever made me feel-
of all that has brought peace
to the storm within me.
