December 2023
Neera Kashyap
Neerak7@gmail.com
Bio Note: This appears to be a season for themes for poetry journals and anthologies. I enjoyed responding to a journal with the theme, 'Inclusion', and for an anthology themed, 'Rasoi'. Translated into English, Rasoi means Kitchen. But the concept note suggested a wide interpretation: recipes for life; cooking, creating, burning, destroying through home fires! The poems below were written to the prompt, 'I never knew...', which brought up things one never thought about, but emerged as one wrote!

My crawlies

Dry weather.
Moisture in the soil dug up along the park’s walkway
for new seedlings, border shrubs.
Earthworms slither out of hoed soil,
glide abundantly onto flagstone 
till I am forced to sit on a bench.
They crawl around my shoes like slow undulating ribbons
brown, bloody, spineless, 
still burrowing…..
I never knew
watching their vulnerability 
I would feel this intense desire 
to crush them.

Memory shaft

In a forgotten cupboard
a musty album, acid free black pages
separated by bruised tissue paper,
pages of black and white photos -
water marks, discolored by age.
Two girls in pigtails – one towering,
the other backing into a limp curtain.
Photo after photo - one towers, the other cowers.
I never knew that
a lifetime of sibling rivalry
could lead to spasms
of love.
©2023 Neera Kashyap
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