Paradigm Poem by Prathibha Nandakumar

Your fears are my own.

With each step, light gets displaced.
Something travels in our interior landscape.
The external terrain shifts.
I quietly suggest burial of the past.
unaware that it is an echo of the
frightening questions and strange replies
confronted at regular intervals.
Frontiers vanish as suddenly as they appear.
Changing Horizon misleads.
You drive through the forest
cutting between the dense undercover greenery.
Underneath the plain looks,
lie the fiery yearnings.

I invite you into my territory
promising no interrogations.
Pulsating virgin lands beg you for consideration.
I offer my loneliness, defying fury,
in exchange of a spectrum of colours.
Light, you say, can hack one to death,
and pass me through a prism.
It was a decisive threshold into your
Temple of light.

Held by the neck, bruised by the silks,
bandaged body is not much of an offering.
Life survives in my breast.
Overflowing rivers run amok in my veins.
When your arm reaches out to hammer
that one last nail,
I smile at you and open my thighs

and come in a shudder and create
that which can not be. They say
silence and worship go hand in hand.
I sing ardent Sufi songs to please the
Lord of deconstruction who
has no use for this paradigm.
Defining my lines and forms,
he simply designs a plug in the void
and I am content.