Striped Nothings

Folder: 
Satish Verma

Floating on a river of fire 
sitting in a cooking vessel 
you were invoking the rain god. 

Your hollow words had holiness 
of unmeaning. 
The sky opens the third eye. 

Are you going to offer your 
tongue to a footwear 
of a proxy blood? 

As a hymn to goddess of wealth, 
sugar is thrown out of window 
and yellow rice dances before a mirror. 

And here I bleed silently 
for the shooting star* 
who could not conceive. 

*A kind of primrose whose purple flowere have 
backward curving petals hanging down. The 
flowers move skyward on slender stems 
turning their face upward after fertilization.