Between Pages

 

Between Pages

You resemble the comfort
I have been looking for
Down the ages. You call yourself
Food, water, a blossom pressed between pages.
Most strikingly, you say
You are the gardener of sorrow's weeds.

I am the widow unable to eat
Anything but a little fruit for strength.
And when I do not want to go on,
I wearily climb the grand stone steps
After a morning of admiring
The surprising pulchritude
Of the wild musk rose, and
The one green fern in the bog.
This fighting of the heart
To feel the vestiges of joy…
The supposed happiness of the strand
Of the longest white hair, makes me question
If I can ever be comfortable --
You know, like being under a blanket
On a chilly night.
You did not mention blankets.
Nor did you say you would
Answer me when I,
Overwhelmed by what you mean by love,
Call out your name.



Jagari Mukherjee

A gold medalist in English Literature from University of Pune, Jagari Mukherjee is an award-winning bilingual poet, writer, and critic from Kolkata, India who writes in both Bengali and English. Her writings have appeared in several journals like Tuck Magazine, Vox Poetica,  Treehouse Arts, Scarlet Leaf Review, Plum Tree Tavern, and others. Her works have been translated into Bengali, French, and Italian. Among other awards, she won the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2018 for her review of Kiriti Sengupta’s Dreams of the Sacred and the Ephemeral (2017). Jagari is also a Best of the Net 2018 nominee. Her first book, a collection of poems entitled Blue Rose (2017), was published by Bhashalipi, Kolkata.