March 2015
Currently pursuing an MFA at Southampton College, I’ve always lived between this world and the world of fairytales. Myths and Nature inspire me to poems and stories. At present, I am working on a fantasy novel set in a magical New York and on a memoir of my boarding school days. I also write poetry as often as I can. When I was eight, I presented the bewildered clerk at a bookstore with my diary. It was my hope that he would publish it as a book of poetry. Alas, this was not to be.
The Muse
Does anyone ever know
a woman who is in repose?
Sitting, still, she could be
the delight of her graceful ease,
or the stern belief
in her rigid silences.
Standing on the touching slenderness of her feet
she may call the poet who resides in us
to admiring comparisons to an ageless
elm tree.
But still be in the quiet arrest of her beauty,
a complete mystery.
In vain we read the elegance in her dress.
Vainer still are we
in reading poetry in the wind's playfulness
with her hair.
Perhaps we know her only
when the faint melancholy of her lips
suggests the sweetness of a smile -
a smile that perhaps is
the metaphor of her story,
or the first faint music
of a future she hopes to write.
Grandmother
Age had made her young.
The laughter lines around her mouth
said
she was friends with her wisdom.
Once a woman who counted her blessings,
she counted to a vast number
and then gave up counting.
There was no sadness in the eyes
moist as they looked upon her granddaughter,
a child who, impatient in many ways,
knew not to ask her grandmother for advice,
but to trust in her storied wisdom.
Her grandmother's stories wove
beauty into the child's eyes.
Does anyone ever know
a woman who is in repose?
Sitting, still, she could be
the delight of her graceful ease,
or the stern belief
in her rigid silences.
Standing on the touching slenderness of her feet
she may call the poet who resides in us
to admiring comparisons to an ageless
elm tree.
But still be in the quiet arrest of her beauty,
a complete mystery.
In vain we read the elegance in her dress.
Vainer still are we
in reading poetry in the wind's playfulness
with her hair.
Perhaps we know her only
when the faint melancholy of her lips
suggests the sweetness of a smile -
a smile that perhaps is
the metaphor of her story,
or the first faint music
of a future she hopes to write.
Grandmother
Age had made her young.
The laughter lines around her mouth
said
she was friends with her wisdom.
Once a woman who counted her blessings,
she counted to a vast number
and then gave up counting.
There was no sadness in the eyes
moist as they looked upon her granddaughter,
a child who, impatient in many ways,
knew not to ask her grandmother for advice,
but to trust in her storied wisdom.
Her grandmother's stories wove
beauty into the child's eyes.
©2015 Adreyo Sen