Stillness Heals

At dawn, I watch a water lily –
its petals closed – among
leaves and dark reflections
on the pond’s skin. We almost
touch — the pond and I:
I watch the submerged shadows
of my pain rise. Slow ooze
of light, ripples of breath.
Not everything is seeking stillness,
as I am — there’s the tumult of fish
and frog in the bed and a loud flurry
of bird-noises from trees. The water lily
stirs, imperceptibly. Not long
until it wakes, not long until I heal.

Glow

By the time the sky turns a darker shade
of dusk I’ve snapped out of the illusion
that with one quick turn I will walk down
my old garden path. The marigolds
and balsam have dissolved into the rubble,
and there’s not a trace of the wildflowers—
those slips of colour that turned up
in the grass at playtime: here, by this stump
of a tree I’d lie on shimmering moss,
examine the tiny perfection of petal
and phyllid.

Where there’s a fragment of a fence
now, I’d lie — trying to wish on a star
as it shot across the dark, always too quick.
Sometimes, a wish was a meandering firefly—
I’d watch it as it made its lazy trail
to the edge of nothingness
sub-atomic, scintillating. There was so much
that glowed: snails’ trails and mushrooms
and the undersides of leaves —
I wish I had wished on them
instead of giving my light away to the skies.

The stars are showing up one by one.
Here I am, observing them
observing the erasures of the earth
and the ways of the heart —
this must be survival.

Deepa Onkar lives in Chennai, India. She believes that the quiet and reflective spaces that she writes poetry in enable her to freely explore her thoughts and feelings at depth, and offer her a window to witness the magic of creation. Her poems have appeared in The Lake, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Sonic Boom, Poetica Review, The Lothlorien, and others.