Rites of Passage

Encountering grief is a rite of passage,
like love and yet unlike it,
for grief is a long time coming,
a tiger dancing in the dry grass,
our bullets are pills and sometimes we run out of them,
sometimes we play dead, hoping the tiger will go away,
sometimes we are tired of losing so much, we have nothing to
tempt or trade with grief, nothing to scare him away,
and grief takes no prisoners, has no calm, no qualms.
In our grief we speak of the dead so often now,
we wake them, we envy them, we sing them lullabies.

After the rain, there will be rainbows

Illness is like damping of wood
but once it dries, irrational hope will flicker,
with the confidence of candles
against raging stormy winds.
But damp birds don’t fly well.
So we sit and hope,
for hope is a waking dream.
We shiver to warm our bodies
and ask, for we can only ask, our bouncing heart
to settle, to brace for impact,
as we mould ourselves again, again begin
twig by twig, after the rain, when the nests are destroyed,
gone like the dead, gone like the wind.
We bring healing, twig by twig, for new nests and new hopes.

After the rain, there will be rainbows.

The watchers in the rye

No cow turns to see us pass,
or that distant running train,
we, holding hands, so that,
should we fall, we fall together.
We pass by where there was a yellow wood,
where now, a yellow building slants, stands.
We, white as snow, as death, as bones,
as birds’ eggs in nests who do not know
that the mother bird is dead, far away.
Dead like a plant in cosmic darkness.
We like statues, the scarecrows of the elegant house gardens,
eternally grave in all tricks of lights, watching
the all too familiar glint of the moon on broken glass,
on shallow eyes of broken people, the sick and sickening,
who once played hide and seek with us, sat with us in schools,
who we met at birthday parties and broke lunch boxes with,
who are taller than us now and their ears can’t hear us,

who we almost touch like the wind, and then refrain.

Dr. Vaishnavi Pusapati is a physician and poet, previously published in nearly 50 international literary journals and magazines such as Prole, InkPantry, Palisades Review, Dreich, among others).