Four Poems

At last, there is no sun.

[You cannot exert light over a day laid to rest.
What needed to burn, the spent star burnt it. 
It took its course and returned us clearer.
        You were celestial too.
You kept the land wanting, the sky occupied. 
Now the heart rolls over sharp terrains.
May all embers yield to ash.
Against tonight’s glare, the darkness needs you to break. 
Break beautifully.]

Good things have a way of happening unseen.
The river moves also in the dark.

All night the bats

built a city in the sky.
Somewhere in the bushes below,
a cat has gone into labour.
We saw her the other day, 
sneaking with an ear torn and the lover aloof.
Inside the kitchen, silence.
Inside the rooms, silence.
Only the fan whirs and the noise is a disruption.
Three shoots of money plant grow
desperate against the mesh of the window,
the lamp hunched over a book.
This is a city too.
Within walls, patients are wired to stillness.
In my story, there is a beach where once
we were golden.
An hour later, the sky will turn.
At the shore, with us watching, 
a wave appears. 

We might be a reflection of the trees. 

Perhaps also the passing cars. 
Apparitions blurred swift over the silver sheen,
speech gone bucolic under the river's sand.

We might easily be the eagle, the owl 
and the hornbill. Or clouds that lose their form 
to the black fade of the sky.

Something pushed too far to recall.
The dusk’s cerulean flush.
The last bus that started for the valley.
And the hope before the curtains are drawn 
and I turn to see you. 

We might be a mirror to the day, which
at last is also done with us.

Riverwatchers

Somehow fluid, I called this drain a river. 
Afternoon brought us into shade, 
and from the bridge I saw branches leaning.
Like a thing extracted, the sun filtered. 
Shadow-leaves appeared and settled on our limbs. 
This was nowhere, perhaps nowhen. 
A sight yearned out from the world and made private. 
Only the river didn't care.
We came to it because evening had sown love
and it was the only river we could flood. 
Unaware below, it shifted and slowed. 
Always but it reeked.

Mihir Vatsa is the author of the travel memoir Tales of Hazaribagh, for which he was awarded the 2022 Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar. He is the recipient of the Charles Wallace Writing Fellowship, the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize, and a Toto Funds the Arts Award in Writing. A literature scholar by training, he is presently a PhD candidate at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.