History Comes To Sit With Me & Other Poems

By Tejas

(Twitter: @yytejas

Instagram: @yytejas)

History Comes To Sit With Me

On the steps

Leading down

to this silent river

History comes to sit with me

Baggy eyed, her sorrow

Greater than my heart—

Maimed

Distorted Violated

She's of the world

But also mine.

Speaks in whispers

Reveals her mystery in knotted breaths.

Dare I break the spell?

She takes my naive hand in

Her calloused palms, utters

But one word—

Ask!

Mute waters reflect my thirst

To know who I am

Who we are

To learn

To unlearn

To not repeat

To never forget Our collective wrongs.

History wrought of lies

Of a few men

History that I'm writing

Rewriting

By asking.

Ask

Ask

Ask

Until we are all—

Healing

Disentangling

Loving

Human

Again

I sit for a long time

Watching the river

flow back

Voices cry out

Rebel

Rise

Sing

A story of the world

A story of others like me

Now, my story.

So when I feel alone

Different

Small

Brown

Gay

Weak

Divergent

Insignificant

Wronged

Forgotten—

Ask

Ask

Ask

Unmask

I whisper to the past

And history comes to sit with me.

The End Is A Lover

Empty of words

yet so much

long unsaid—

Remember the first

Boy who made my heart flutter

And I wrote down

"His eyes blue,

the sun

shining on me."

Karl

Local library assistant

In Headington.

I didn't dare

So silent scribbles

On nervous paper did:

"Would you like to have coffee?"

Would he care for

a brown foreign

queer Nobody?

Naive or infatuated

Nervous or all

Of the above

Taken prisoner by

the beauty of a boy

Who never once thought

To reply.

Maybe it was girls

For him and him

For me.

Books from then on,

In another library.

A beginning

is courage —

heartfulness

from old French —

To say

With words :

I show you my heart

And be rejected

With silence.

The End came

Like a lover

To spurn

The Start.

Yet it turns

And beats

Stupid muscle

Emptied out

But still finds

Words doomed

to refill spaces

Unloved by

Time.

About The Author:

Tejas Yadav is a polyglot writer and scientist whose work has been published in Burnt Roti, Borderless Journal, Tiny Buddha and Literary Traveler etc.

You can find him on Twitter and Instagram @yytejas