CONTEMPORARY INDIAN POETRY – Love poem, by Tishani Doshi

Tishani Doshi – graduated with a master’s degree in creative writing from the Johns Hopkins University – she is an Indian poet, journalist and dancer, and was born in the city of MADRAS in 1975, but currently she lives on a beach, between two fishing villages. Tishani’s debut novel (The pleasure seekers), was shortlisted for the Hindu Literary Prize, and she has published six books of poetry and fiction.

LOVE POEM > Ultimately, we will lose each other to something. I would hope for grand circumstance, death or disaster. But it might not be that way at all. It might be that you walk out one morning after making love to buy cigarettes, and never return, or I fall in love with another man. It might be a slow drift into indifference. Either way, we’ll have to learn to bear the weight of the eventuality that we will lose each other to something. So why not begin now, while your head rests like a perfect moon in my lap, and the dogs on the beach are howling? Why not reach for the seam in this South Indian night and tear it, just a little, so the falling can begin? Because later, when we cross each other on the streets, and are forced to look away, when we’ve thrown the disregarded pieces of our togetherness into bedroom drawers and the smell of our bodies is disappearing, like the sweet decay of lilies, what will we call it, when it’s no longer love? http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Begins-Elsewhere-Tishani-Doshi/dp/1556594429