When The Pyre Whispered Me To Dust Poem by Susanta Pattnayak

I stood—shivering,
not from wind, but memory—
as flames licked the soles of my feet,
though I was no longer in them.

There I was—laid down like silence,
wrapped in wood and weeping marigolds,
a crumpled letter addressed to the cosmos,
and signed in blood.

My corpse turned its head,
a neckless swivel of smoke and bone—
eyes hollow, yet brimming with knowing.
'You made it, ' it said, voice flaring like a candle.

We stared—me with borrowed breath,
it with none but the breath of burning.
'What now? ' I asked the ash of myself.
'What always, ' it replied.

'The oddity was never death, '
it sighed, 'but how you feared it more than forgetting to live.'

The jaw cracked.
The tongue—charred—told its final tale:
'Your heartbeat was the curtain,
not the play.'

Then, the skull split—
not with pain, but prophecy.
Dust leapt like truth into the air,
and I breathed it.

I still taste myself in the wind.