Dorothy sits on the porch
embracing boketto,
spilt wine stains permanent
on her satiny, white wedding dress,
sibilant whispers uttering his name,
reading through the letters he sent and says:
“10 months since June 9th,
epiphany strikes in this chaotic mind of mine.”
Making uneasy, her aeipathy
as the heart goes achy,
in the abode of snow or coast
or places she doesn’t know;
far, far away
where he lives sanguinolent days.
Vinyl records play his voice, though he’s in barracks.
Forever a tattoo, the postage stamps,
letters of cursive like the twirls of his tongue,
speaking of stories of ‘when we were young’.
Inseparable, the pictures say,
like the warmth of her love on his stone-cold face.
“Through the soft sweeping breeze,”
she says, “he’s with me,
and the orange sky
reminds me of his smile.”
Once a small-town girl, innocent and naïve,
dreams of a wedding and becoming a wife.
She now fights with uncertainty,
lives in nights and evenings of melancholy.
And she knows now what she always feared
yet predicted somehow—grains of sand fill his palms,
he’s hugged the earth in his arms.
But before his lashes closed,
the only word he spoke
was “Dorothy”.
-Prerona Barman
B.A (H) Sociology
(Edited by Anushka Varma
Art curated by Devangana )
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