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Poetry
Memory: The Fifth Season of Life
The ones who walk on tiptoe through time’s creases
Are always tripped by the roots of cosmos daisies,
Their blossoms, in the dark, disintegrating into hourglasses,
Nourishing the latitude within them,
Where frost will never settle.
After the thirtieth autumn,
The migratory birds peck at the empty air —
Winter fragments into salt crystals, gathering on lashes.
And deep within the tree rings,
Iris petals unfold in reverse,
Ironing out the faded dusk,
Reheating the moments when we once fished stars from blurred morning light,
Comets and their phosphorous tails slipping through our fingers,
Forming the footnotes that pulse on ancient scrolls.
When the monsoon stirs the tides of memory,
Every night shattered by the beak of a migrating bird
Regrows at the edges of paper,
The tattered kite — its string broken — hovers
In the center of amber,
And promises settled at the bottom of cups
Begin to shimmer again.
