Poetry: Neera Kashyap

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A Wind Murmurs

I cannot give up on my madness

for she will not let me.

My body a wavering curtain of decaying flesh,

my mind a caged wounded breathless animal.

Steeling her shoulders, rooting her feet, she is a tree,

gnarled, bare, breathing,

letting wan light into the cage like a godly shaft,

challenging my psychosis to pull free

with her wand of light, her words she murmurs to herself

like the wind in her branches:

‘Never give up on someone, hard as it may be…

to see only the good is to deny the evil in oneself,

magnifying its power to devour good, turn it into itself –

a curtain of decaying flesh,

a caged wounded breathless animal.’

The wind blows in, affirms a blurry self-knowledge:

to love the good I must see the evil – first in myself

not fight or disown it,

not pronounce right or wrong,

simply know it to be there, always there,

simply love the good more.

I dream of a bird fleeing its cage,

resting on the branch of a gnarled tree,

listening to the song of a wind that caresses

in wan light.

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BIO

Neera Kashyap has had a career in environmental & health journalism and communication. She has authored a book of short stories for young adults Daring to Dream, (Rupa & Co.) and contributed to five prize-winning anthologies of children’s literature (Children’s Book Trust). As a writer of short fiction, poetry, book reviews and essays, her work has appeared in literary journals and poetry anthologies published in the USA, UK, Singapore, Pakistan and India. The anthologies include ‘Hibiscus’ & ‘Shimmer Spring’ (Hawakal Publishers, India), ‘The Kali Project’ (Indie Blue Publishers, USA), Poetica 1 & 2 (Clarendon Publishing, UK), the ‘Anthology of Erotic poetry’, (Red River, India), ‘Freedom Raga’ (Exceller Books, India), with some poems due to appear in forthcoming collections.

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