2 Poems by Megha Sood

Catharsis

There is an empty space
a blankness—
filling the wedges between our silence
Our solitude begs for the presence
an utterance,
a word, a syllable.
 
We write as a compulsion
as a necessity to thwart the darkness
looming inside our soul
fervently trying to fill the empty spaces
with the light born out of blatant truth
 
We stay alive,
we stay breathing;
we try to fill our solitude with the
consonants of our burlesque love
we try and try till we fail
till our ashen soul is parched 
and dried off all our verses
 
We stand still and mute like the baked earth
pitted with the lexicon of pain and angst
knowing deep inside that
something has to give
That the tourniquet has to be loosened again.
The thread of protection is cutting too deep to the skin.

We all  can see the pain resting 
in the black swirls of our eyes
begging for the next word
to come down as a tear.

Bones: An ode to survival

My bones rattle
as they speak the truth
my bones reek of time
and stores memories in them
like the calcified truth

My bones store the light
they carry the burden
of the hidden scars
marked and chalked on its joints

My bones sometimes sing the lullaby
a soothing song for your ears
and sometimes
rings in the symphony of death

They are shedding the truth by times
slowly and surely
reminders of the mortality
this ossified truth
beneath my skin
holding the truth together.

You think you can dissolve and  crush their identity
in your guile and acidic reality
but bones have patience
they will stand their ground
till the truth is unlodged for everyone to see.

My bones, a winding maze of hollow memories
a living testament;
marked and etched 
with survival stories 
where time stays deathly still.

---

Megha Sood is an Award-Winning Poet, Editor, Author, based in New Jersey, USA. Associate Editor at MookyChick(UK), Life and Legends (USA), and Literary Partner “Life in Quarantine” with Stanford University, USA.Recipient of 2021 Poet Fellowship from MVICW (Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing) and 2020 National Level Winner Spring Mahogany Lit Prize. Author of Chapbook ( “My Body is Not an Apology”, Finishing Line Press, 2021) and Full Length (“My Body Lives Like a Threat”, FlowerSongPress,2022).

Website| https://meghasworldsite.wordpress.com/about/
PW.org | https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/megha_sood