New Found Love

By Richa Bajaj

 

I want to embrace the trunk of the Oak
To clasp it
With full arms
Hungry for comfort.

 

It stood showering for me throughout the long summer
Its green hearts.

 

I want to feel its skin,
Its rough weather-beaten being with my fingers,
I long to rest my palm and wrist on its eager body
So I feel the throb of its thick veins inside me.

 

I Count my pulse with its wavy rhythms
Its scratched edgy trunk,
and suddenly bursts open a new found love in me

.

Sometimes though I have wished
To lie under that full-bloom Gulmohar
So I saw the orange sky above
Smiling all along at me
Complete, vast, overpowering
As if I painted my sky blood-red
And became that colour!

 

I had waited for decades to greet this bloom on me
And for this colour to reflect its shine on me.

 

A tear trickled suddenly!
My blue veins crawled on my arm,
They began to look like the tree above
That was twisted, green--
Branched out all over me.

 

Richa Bajaj, Ph.D., from India is a writer with love for verse as an art form. She has also written short stories, and critical essays that have been published in books and journals. Her co-authored book "Muktibodh in Our Time" came out in 2012. Interested deeply in Indian writing in English, her discussions about contemporary fiction and poetry have been recorded for e-lectures. Of late, she has engaged in translating poems and prose works from Hindi into English. Richa Bajaj teaches in the Department of English, Hindu College, University of Delhi.