An evocative and intense dark poem, by Ritamvara, exclusively for Different Truths.
Cynthia has cried twice in sleep like King Duncan did before getting stabbed on someone else’s bed. Her bed barely has any space for discomfort. It is covered with lush velvet in crimson… Her sharp nails are painted with the same colour and have pierced deep into the softness of her bed sheet, like you are provoked to slit through anything that is perfect. Her eyelids are turned upward showing the slight redness of blood boiling in everything that is alive and youthful. Fishes in the market are checked for the redness of their nostrils, rechecked many a times to know whether the blood still boils red after death.
The windows of her room give way to the sky which is partially crimson due to the procuration of night and the unfinished unison of two phases of time. The sidewalk of the city has some flush red bougainvillea on its pavement and the little girl on her way to school pulverize some redness in her small fist.
Cynthia is now recklessly hankering for her soul in sleep. Her throat quivers. The trapped mosquito of the last night digs its forelegs through her throat.… It harrows further for some blood but the search is unfathomable. She pokes her sharp nails into the belly of the mosquito, burrowing it harder to death. Her search for some liquid blood at last gets satiated in a glass of red wine and some sleeping pills.
Photo from the Internet
Ritamvara Bhattacharya writes from a darling’s heart, Darjeeling. She believes in what Sylvia Plath said, “And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” She writes for the pleasure of doing so. She writes for the ‘I am’ in her heart, a voice that creates ripples and sensation
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Such an intense and mesmerizing poetic piece. It draws you deep, makes you feel lovely and darkly lovable to your own self being. I was in a lucid dream all the while I tasting the redness of this poem.