Alles, Alles
“And something miraculous will come
close to the darkness and ruin…”
- Anna Akhmatova, Everything
Everything rings willow most days and wears every shade
of jade. Eyes and trees set life running free;
no shape binds this Indus. And we watch something
left or lost somewhere, laughter or tears held back
but not our pulse and cant though the old
returns inside us.
When you leave a country, do its rivers
tremble on your skin long after
from cloudbursts and shower
clinging for breath?
I rest now after escapes.
But the past hunts always. And what is seen
sharp or faint makes banks we occupy.
Do places ever let us go?
After journeys, here is this country, the Ganges
and a woman found – one seed, one pulse, one spruce.
What country leaves us – ones we choose,
ones that own us, all hold shadows
and these songs we must know.
Eyes are willow, ghosts or healing;
home is warm, or a stranger, and all rhythm’s
a bronzed dancer with hands on hips – a whole woman.
Out of the alien country, I’m dancing;
all shadows keep singing; hand on hip, always alive within
and dying, we shake off tides.
Spirit of Song, unearth us
bold as metal through all of this.
Jessu John is a journalist from India. She’s currently working on completing her first collections of poetry and short fiction. Earlier versions of her poems have been published in US based journals Urban Confustions, Sugar Mule and The Rusty Nail.