‘Our shadows drag us back’: Poems by 2024 Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar winner Ramesh Karthik Nayak

Butterflies

Cursed witches
possess the life of butterflies –
colour-dust of each flower
alight on papery wings.

Butterflies – some buzz aflutter
while some suckle nectar.

An emptiness occupies eyes,
hearts melt on petals.

The darkness of lust
seduces colours on wings.

Vagrant glances pin down butterflies
onto the pyre of wilted petals.

Spells of their past lives
force flowers to effervesce in abundance.

The season that ashes the world
tramples creatures into a netherworld.

Two Worlds

We neither escape dawn as a leaflet
nor slave nights as broken emerald stones –
a border between light and dark
tugs potently, our hearts.

We, the toys with mortal features –
flesh, bones, blood and pain, unbearable.

Emptiness obliges
us to explain
to trees, hills and rivers,
about life.

Black decides the world of nothing.
White decides the world of everything.

Emptiness walks with us
our shadows drag us back.

Emptiness sheds the skin of days
but dreams don't let us go wasted.

Heart wants to fly higher than clouds
but the black world wraps it up with purity.

Our body’s shadow devours the sun’s rays
but the white world draws borders to the body

Both worlds make puppets out of us
in their pretentious veil of kindness.

They are transparent –
they wear us too,
dwell on earth with air
as our companions
leaving us orphaned.

Ancestors

Darkness rains
when bats weep in chorus.

Night thickens as katkya
where living beings go back to wombs.

Beyond the sky our ancestors
wait for news from earth.

Fireflies carry
our whereabouts to bloomed stars,
stars turn into buds.

Our ancestors
stash the buds they gathered,
buds turn into golden seeds,
they sow them in the soil of the sky
to harvest human beings.

Note: Katkya means Collyrium.

Cowrie Shell

By the side of footprints on the shores,
the air sings from the cowrie shell
in the graceful nights.

The scary heartbeat of death
and prickly suffering pain,
hide for strength inside the shell.

The warm embrace of...

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