Desolation: A Love Poem by Jagari Mukherjee

Your smile is the rain

 of an Indian summer.

I drink in with my eyes, 

imprinting every curve of your mouth 

(through complex lenses of the mind)

 onto the glossy papers

of memory. 

(You, to me, I yearn to bind.)

So rare do you smile at me

that the leaves in the flower-pot

 of my soul strain to catch the drops. 

For you I am forgotten furniture 

in the attic, or a prop.

Someone else blooms in your heart,

as fresh a rose that ever was,

the cause of my despair,

the glittering gold over which

my desolation darts like a wounded doe.

I live in the cold, rowing in ice.

Were I a child, you could’ve heard my cries.

Perhaps it is a lie that nobody dies alone.

I fear not death, but a life without

memories of you. 

I welcome the faintest light.

I will brew my passion 

in the jar where desolation and hope

comrades are.

There seems to be a lonely star

in the sky tonight. 

The winner of the 2019 Reuel International Prize for Poetry, Jagari Mukherjee is the Founder and Chief Executive Editor of the literary journal, EKL Review. She has authored four solo collections of poetry–two chapbooks and two full-length volumes. Her most recent chapbook is “Letters To Inamorato” (2022) published by Penprints Publication. She has won numerous prestigious awards, including the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize for Book Review(2018),  the Women Empowered Gifted Poet Award (2020),  the Jury Prize at  Friendswood Library’s Ekphrastic Poetry Reading And Contest (2021), and most recently, The Bharat International Award for Literature 2022 For Short Story.