A Hot Noon Poem by Saroj Padhi

Memory is a crippled bird, wingless
Disabled for any flight,
Softly cooing in corner of a tree
Like a stuck-up torn kite,
Sulking in sad voice of a noon wind
Away from common sight.
Your jasmine body drenched in rain
From yester night's sky, is formless now
In the heat of smokes rising from lightly wet sands,
Heating up in the dead bank of our river,
Lost to obliterating strokes of times;
Making it quite difficult for me to restore
Your aroma and form in nuances of my rhymes.
I'm a dot in the outlines of your thoughts
Transpiring thro' pores of your wrinkled spirit
That pines for salvation in the folds of old desires
Shrinking and then withering
Like petals under this noon, blistering;
And I, seething like an embattled desire
In the womb of fallen mire,
Writhing like an insect
For redemption in the dark web of a noon fire.