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In dreams, the oar tilts

The sun fades beneath the coconut groves

I hear the faint murmur of a girl on a boat to her ancestral home

 

In Malabar it’s raining….

The gardenias bloomed and fell with the night’s rain

The brown earth blushed when the rain kissed 

Frogs mated in joy, flaunted their love.

 

Inside my blue room, I tilted, stiffened and lay awake

Waiting for a kiss, to make love and to bloom again in rapture

I heard the footsteps outside my window

Traced it back to Malabar, to my ancestral home

And touched the familiar sweat that smothered when it rained outside…

The hills listened,

The earth rejoiced, I bloomed, wept and fell…

The footsteps now distant

The anguish palpable ….

And still, it rains in Malabar!

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Keerthana Raj is an occasional poet and an avid reader who brews poetry from her home in Kerala filled with plants and memories. An academic and a researcher, she’s currently documenting the food memoirs and embodied narratives of coastal women in Kerala. She’s interested in the creative intersections of gender, sensory memories and embodied subjectivity and how it finds expression in our lived experiences.