---

You have left yourself in me,

in the smell of a sweat bead from your lifelong toil.

I have inherited.
 

The lines in my palms,

born from when you pressed yours against mine –

They show Time.

They show anxiety.

Laboured levity and the brevity of your joy –

The calamity of your life,

The fatality in your strife

The finality –

– preceding the hospital days when I already knew the lies

                                                                                  I’d hear in the next few

 

I see you in the mirror, sometimes.

In my worry about money

and make-something-out-of-nothing hurry.

I’m not half as good as you

but I have the marks of you.

I have some parts of you –

although transmuted or renewed –

I know they’re there.

You left yourself in me.

And there’s no special way I feel

about it;

I often doubt it.

 But I felt it with the certainty of death this afternoon

(though with an ease quite like a swoon’s)

And then I saw between the stars of winters past and present moon –

 

I felt it’s true.

 

You left yourself in me.
 

You did,

don’t you believe?

---

Yamini Bharadwaj is a high school student on the outside – but it is her internal life that she defines herself by, and which activates when she is alone. It bleeds sometimes into her poetry, which she often keeps tucked away and hidden – although, once in a while, such as on this occasion – she resolves to put it out.