sighing out loud
a collection of poems by KOMAL
SARODE
30 poems written over 30 days in quarantine as part of Global Poetry Writing Month based on prompts by the Alipore Post.
1. Gentle oh, the beauty and power in all things soft and quiet. the way a falling leaf lands on the ground, or fresh snow on your face. Makes me dream of a world where every fall could be that gentle. Gentleness. I find it wrapped in moments; how the other day my sister replaced her hands with a pillow under mine when I’d fallen asleep hugging her and she had to leave. I find it In the song my best friend recommends when at 2am I tell her I can’t fall asleep
And it becomes the perfect lullaby. I find it In assurances that don’t try too hard to fix or appease. Gentle. The way a first kiss almost always feels. The way you hold their face in your palm for the first time. It is what I find at the heart of courage, of resilience. In the will to get out of bed after breaking down. In learning to smile at the person in the mirror who you keep forgetting deserves your kindness too. While I may dream of a world where all falling is gentle, I’m glad
to get to live in one where rising always is.
2. Patterns I smile politely, then look away and hope you wouldn’t mind my armour of awkwardness. I daydream, I hope. And suddenly find myself on a downward slope. Doubt, hesitation, the rushing of blood to my face. A bounding pulse, just keeping up with my mind’s pace. But all’s not in vain; for I leave the track as soon as I see the approaching train. The impulse for a better turn comes just as I begin to fear the impending crash and burn. So I slow down, breathe deep. Sow little seeds of love whose flowers
I may someday reap. Patterns – they'll always be – To hold us with a seemingly tight grip, To keep falling into. Most to break away from, few to keep. Perhaps we could stop seeking them, stop weaving the past into the future, making a tangled mess of our lives, and simply for the moment in front of us, be goddamn alive.
3. Distance I don't do well with it. Sometimes, I still feel like the kid who'd never let go of her mom, who was also the kid who never let anyone else come close. Maybe, I understood closeness only in binaries. I still don't know how to keep people at arm's length. Stay here with me. Let me hold your hand. Or do not knock on my door . And when that's not possible, when the world requires that we stay apart, let me enter your dreams. let me hold you. ‘cause I don't do well with d i s t a n c e.
4. Unsolved When I was little, I had this weird compulsion to solve all the textbook problems the night before math exam. Even when they were the same kind, just different numbers. Of course (and thankfully), the obsessive persistence didn't get to see my adult life. I became okay with unfinished things. Saw limits as real. Gave up on figuring out life, but not on trying to get it right, not for long anyway. I am still learning and unlearning to be okay with participating in life without having it solved beforehand.
5. Home Here's an idea. To make a home of your own heart. Using boxes of memories, build a favourite piece of furniture. Carve out a nook. Adorn it with lights and flowers of loving affirmations. Can it be the corner you daydream in? Imagine a loved one's lap to rest your head full of worries in. Carry pillows, soft and fluffy, to sometimes cry into and then make fortresses out of. Every now and then, clean out the dust of resentments and past hurts, the gunk of guilt and regrets. Invite people in; Make it open and welcoming. Lay your masks down. You are safe here. You belong here. You are accepted here. And that's how you can always be home. When you carry it in your body.
When the chambers of your heart become the four sturdy walls of your home.
6. Suddenly Suddenly, The end of the world doesn't seem so tragic when there are other worlds you get to travel just through flipping pages. Suddenly, all seriousness loses meaning when you wake inside of a dream. Suddenly, you laugh as you get the joke without fully understanding the premise.
7. Advice I run out of it frequently when troubles loom like large dark clouds over a loved one’s head. I only wish that they believe in their own light and not give up on life. When advice won’t work, prayer is all I can offer. May you be safe May you be happy May your heart be at ease. I know solutions are ultimately better than solace, and you will reach them in your own ways. Until then, I will sit with you in darkness, hold you as you weep, and hope you find solace, as you gather the strength to walk towards light.
8. Lines I couldn't always make sense of them for I've been far too much in love with infinity. Unstructured and unruly, that's how I see me. And the idea of being contained never did please me. But I tried. Tried hard to colour within the lines, always spilling out. I've heard that's what love is. The spilling out of boundaries of you and I. But it takes two to merge, doesn't it? So then what happens when only one of us can't stop flowing? For what can a girl do when she never quite learnt how to colour within the lines. But I'm learning.
Their utility just as much as their aesthetic. That boundaries are meant not so much to limit as to protect. That to let someone's footsteps in, they need to respect the sanctity of the space. For even the wild sea in all her infinity is still beautiful from the shoreline.
9. Silence Have you ever taken the time to swim in it? Scary, isn’t it, when you look at the depth it holds, and the sharks that surround? Sharks, and shadows of everything you’ve been trying to avoid, waiting to take you down. So you fight. Or escape. Making the monsters real in the process. But there is a better way. You give in. Surrender. Sink to the bottom. The fish come and go. You see them, but they don’t bother you. You get still. You float and become the water itself. The world is reflected in you. All you have to do is surrender to the silence and become it.
10.
Yesterday
Nothing of much consequence happens anymore Or at least that's what it feels like. I lose days if I don't pay attention. Attention to glorious mundane details like the first sip of the first aamras of the season, the exchange of childhood photos with a friend, how the night sky looked when I glanced at it after so many days of forgetting I still had access to it. I lose the days I don't record. It's easy to think they're all the same. But each one is waiting for you to notice how everything is happening for the first time and the last, how tomorrow could never be quite like the yesterday passed.
11.
Comfort
I’m starting to see it can be a dangerous thing – comfort. It is pleasure without the bad rep. It deceives, gives you false assurances. Do not seek it. Rather make discomfort your friend. It will lead you to magnificent places and make you a better person in turn. But comfort wants you to stay there. Stay the same. Even if it destroys you. It leads you to seek itself in the wrong pair of arms & dead jobs & complacency. Comfort is a phantom dressed in pink. Be very very wary of it.
12.
Poetry
(not a poem) The reason I prefer poetry to prose is to some degree that, I can get away with having to rationalize too much. I’m a feeler, you see. I want to tell you the nuances of what I feel without letting on the context. An attempt to have a shared narrative that can possibly bind us without revealing the story. I know it’s a cheap tactic – this lack of transparency, this protection against the risk of over-sharing, protection against all accountability, responsibility and not the least, vulnerability. Maybe somewhere I know that I probably won’t be understood, so I’d rather be vague. Let you, the reader make it mean to you however you want it to. You see, I’ve always felt a little different, not in a special kind of way but in a weird sort of way. Maybe my life experiences don’t warrant the feelings I end up feeling or writing about, and hence I deem the context irrelevant. Because it was no big deal as compared to what I make in my head. So, I go by the truth of feelings. Now I don’t mean feelings are in any way the absolute truth of a situation – far from it. They are exaggerated, unreliable, messy and chaotic. But they are not wrong. They are what they are. I can be unequivocal about them. And when everything is in the end, a subjective experience, aren’t your feelings the only entities that remain untwisted and true in your narrative? So, all I can hope is to feel a little less alone as I talk about my fears and flaws with you, and a bit more understood.
And maybe, one day, I’ll be brave enough to own my stories too, and then we could share those too?
13.
If
What would the world look like if we all drank from the well of love and compassion without feeding the monsters of fear and greed? If we stopped denying our interconnectedness with each other and everything else? If we stopped pretending that an unjust, unfair world is the only way to be? If we questioned our old notions of normalcy? If we laid down stronger foundations to build a new world after a catastrophe?
14.
Summer
What summers meant then ~ playing outside all day, touching your friends’ faces (being able to), antakshari under the stars when the lights go out, mangoes, movie nights, swimming, respite from school, daydreaming, florals, bliss, creating memories. What summer means now – time with the fam, indoors, looking at your friends through screens, laying in bed a lot, books, movie nights, mangoes, anxiety, lonely nights spent staring at the ceiling, endless chores, dancing in the kitchen, old hindi songs, nostalgia, creating memories.
15.
Mother
If I begin to think of all the things you’ve done for me, I’d run out of paper and pride. So I think only of the little things like how your chai always tastes of hope after a sleepless night, and how on some days, your laughter & even your nagging are all I need to feel all right. Crying, cribbing, clinging – despite my difficult ways, you’ve stood by me fiercely on all kinds of days. I guess what I mean to say is you’re the only manifestation of love I’ve known.. that stays.
16.
Green
You keep wishing for a miracle for someone to bring rain and paint green the parched terrain your life lies on. Not realizing that the magic is in the tending and nurturing, the fulfilment in the watering itself, and the resulting bloom, only a cherry on the tree!
17.
Window
I like looking at buildings from outside, preferably a terrace. A universe of parallel stories happening just at a distance, giving me some even from mine. Each window a portal to stories of tangled lives. How I miss having this perspective, this distance from being too human, the escape from being yet another story, the feeling of losing myself, yet being more. Now I’m just a tiny something sitting by a window, writing, gazing at the tree outside and the sky beyond, occasionally at other windows. And as a light flicks on in one, indicative of human presence, I find comfort in being small, in being a part of something bigger, after all.
18.
Normal
Can we please do away with our obsession with the ‘normal’? Let loose our madness, give room to our sadness, not calculate whose turn it is to text first, not question our sanity over someone’s discomfort at your expression of sensitivity. Let’s stop measuring ourselves against illusory standards of the normal. Let’s dance naked not hiding any flaws, if anything, we’ll wear them as claws. There is no sin in your deviancy. Don’t kill your magic striving for normalcy.
19.
Blind
This is how it goes you lead me on I resist, then give in. We make up scenarios I disbelieve, then make up more on my own. We lay down bricks on the shaky ground of false intimacy & deluded daydreams. Why, what could go wrong when all was well in my mind's eye? But just as reality doesn't bend to my will, neither do my feelings to your whims. This is not to blame you but to remind me that when reality holds a mirror, don't project your fantasies on it and the next time a shiny object catches your eye, don't let it blind you to all that worth you hold within.
20.
Fragrant
I would rather lose myself to my senses than lose myself to my mind for the latter is a dark place while the former can wake you up to life. So, I'd rather let myself be consumed by fragrant aromas of the cardamom in my tea, the jasmine in my ittar, the lavendar in my candle and the wet earth in summer air than to let myself be consumed by the thoughts of what would it be like to lie down next to you every time you say 'I wish you were here’.
21.
Surprise
Surprise is what I feel at how easily I forgive, as if my mind can forget, as if the body ever does.
22.
Restless
I'm having trouble sleeping at night (just like everybody?) I don't toss and turn, just stare at the ceiling. My body at rest, my mind restless, in more places than one, running, retreating, reaching nowhere. I try not following it's lead. I come back to my body, try to remember that I've nowhere to be but here. Only here. The mind is a difficult child to put to rest. Come back to the body. Let the breath guide you back. And then you can be at rest, unbothered as you watch the child play.
23.
April
This passage of time, gone unaccounted for, gone by too soon, drenched in poetry and coffee and tears, baked in banana bread, uncovered through introspection, grounded in slowness, introduced to solitude infused with longing, defined with new ways of being, of connecting, of happiness, rewilding, smelling of spring, tasting of mangoes, bringing you back home to yourself, to the heart, to essentials. This passage of time, April.
24.
Pause
Find the freedom contained in pause lest you get swallowed up whole in busy-ness and binge. Pause, as your eyes open, before waves of thought carry you to shores you didn’t intend to reach, before you scramble for your phone and lose yourself in the horrors of yesterday. Pause, when you find yourself at the edge of a downward spiral. Pause, when all that your mind wants to do is rewind and fast forward. Pause, so that you can live better when you finally hit play.
25.
Dream
Hazy, ethereal, my dreams seem to come from another realm. I shake them off, trade them for conventional ones. Low on inspiration, I’m scared not of chasing the wrong ones, nor of leaving behind the ones that matter, unfulfilled, but of losing altogether the ability to dream.
26.
Emergency
I couldn’t have had a more sheltered life, always kept 6ft apart from a perceived strife. How am I to know of real danger then? I couldn’t, right? Or is it the very reason that in everything I see, I look for monsters hiding in plain sight? Monsters that I don’t feel equipped to deal with. Should I learn to slay these imaginary dragons then or simply learn to co-exist, & hide them away in secrecy? I just wish that every time I looked quiet on the outside, my insides would stop feeling like they are in a constant state of emergency.
27.
Recipe
I figure, the secret to make any recipe work, whether food or love, is one gentle scoop of attention sprinkled generously all over. Because then you’ll see the effect of every act, how the elements react, and change, and enrich the delicacy. It will reward you with the flavour of trust – in yourself, in your intuition and estimate, in turn rewarding you with the gift of experience. This is how the cycle strengthens. You’ll be aware of what to avoid the next time. Maybe, you wouldn’t hurry to have it ready before it really is. You’ll understand how much ‘to taste’ caters to your liking.
And the last trick – to garnish with two teaspoons of surrender. To let everything you’ve put in come to life on its own terms, not rushing, intending but not insisting that it turn out a certain way. And then you’ll know the sign of a good recipe, whether food or love, is for it to be consumed completely.
28.
Language
I have a long way to go to be fluent in even one for I mix up tongues, and forget words, and laugh in all of them. To express, to feel understood, to belong, it serves the purpose like a warm old friend. It’s a comfort, a solace, frustrating only at times when the chosen language of my rage uses not legible words but tears as its alphabet. It’s strange how words seem to abandon me when I need ‘em the most, when I’m overwhelmed by gratitude or by grief, by love, by longing. Would you attempt to decipher then what my eyes speak? Deduce meanings from my silences? Only until I
pave my way back to words, until I write you poems.
29.
Map
I wish someone just drew me a map, show me where I was in the grand scheme of things, all the possible routes available, all the places they’d lead me to. A treasure hunt of sorts, without the trial and error. No, I’m not really lost, for how can one be lost when they haven’t any destination on mind. So, please make it easy; I’m not very good with directions, nor do I register landmarks. Make the clues recognizable, and the answers undeniable. Strike a lightning – a cosmic wink – to show me I’m on the right path. Maybe this is all a bit much to ask. Maybe the joy of the journey is in the taking of turns – whether right or wrong. Maybe you don’t need a map at all, when you have an in-built compass to guide you
to your treasure box. Maybe the treasure is not what you find at the flagged checkpoint, but what unravels within you as you keep journeying on, taking turns – right or wrong, always coming home to yourself.
30.
Goodbye
It might take a while to find the good in goodbyes. It’s okay to take the time to mourn, to feel the emptiness, to let out a sigh. And when it comes in a different shape and form, welcome the joy, let it fill the room. But while you wait in the space alone, revel in it. Make it your own, before giving any part of it away. And though goodbyes are hard, painful even when necessary, the voids they seem to leave do not mean you are any less for it now. The sense of loss does not take away the richness of the experience, only reminds you of it, making room for more, always more.