In your eyes is a dream of roses misdreamed.
Here at the ghat of the only world you say
you want from love only it’s beginning.

In your crushed arms I hear the beloved sing.
The watery assurance of rain in her voice
wipes clean this film of forgetting

your years have settled into. On the picture
postcard of your past, faith towers tall like
pines and trains always arrive on time

to keep an appointment with want.
The sky is weighted with desire, the earth’s skin
creased with longing. Every poem is a hymn

calligraphed in memory. In your unlit home,
promise is frayed and the air has holes. 
I darn them as you sleep and at dawn

leave the sun with instructions to pour you grace.
In your dreams roses are rising from ashes, looking
for routes to bloom where they first belonged.

…

Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College affiliated to Kolhan University, Chaibasa. She is the author of three collections of poems, her latest work being featured in EPW, Pine Cone Review, EKL Review, The Woman Inc., Live Wire, Madras Courier, Berfrois and Yearbook of Indian English Poetry 2020-21, among others. Shortlisted for the Deepankar Khiwani Memorial Prize 2022, Basudhara loves, rebels, writes and reviews from Jamshedpur, Jharkhand, India.