A poignant, heart-wrenching poem, for Shail’s friend, who succumbed to Covid. A tribute exclusively for Different Truths.

Feisty fireflies of freedom
traverse the crowded caravan of careless cruising,
drowning me in an air of heightened self-obsessed aura
making me gasp for zephyr

like she must have done
in that lonely medical ward,
loosening her grip on the freedom to live.
Pain, fear – paling substitutes, mere instruments
to freeze her freedom on the life path
to wean oneself away
from all that was restricting, limiting

like a lonely green dustbin lying at the end of the road
waiting for a delayed trash truck during pandemic times.
“Don’t indulge her” a part of me advises.
“You are not letting her go free” another piece of wise counsel
treads in out of nowhere. But, try as I might,
her presence in memories and after death
sticks onto me like a friendly leech
that feasts on my emotions only to make me heal

from a hurt  that loves and beckons.
“what if the soul wants to live her sudden deprivation
of freedom through my sense of loss?”
my mind, the devil’s advocate is at it again.
And yet, I hear her out-
her whining woes, her relatable regrets,
her grinding grudges on her final journey

deluged by a cocktail of emotions going out of fashion,
I hallucinate a freedom stride on the sea of humanity
like a modern saint treading on bubbles of water,
where the dead, the hurting, the living, the imprisoned
and the free merge like a sea of variant colours
uniting to vanquish the undying securities of the subconscious
hoping for a nirvana out of nothingness.

When she is done, she will set me free.
Until then, I shall mourn and bleed…

Visual by Different Truths

Shail Raghuvanshi

Shail Raghuvanshi is a poet, freelance journalist, copyeditor, voice actor, and artist with 30 years of experience in various media. She has worked as the Cultural Correspondent for India's first integrated media company, PLUS Channel, and has written course material for Madurai Kamaraj University's Post Graduate Programme in Advertising and Public Relations. She has also been a coach of Communicative English. She has published poems, short stories, and articles in leading magazines and anthologies.

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