Photo-poetry Exchange: Finding You

Hello. Its been so long since I blogged – over a year and counting now – that I needed a couple of minutes to get used to the new WordPress.

My last post was about photo stories or photopoem in my case. A year since and my fascination with mixing text and images remain unabated. This time though Hayah and I started discussing a collaborative mini project: essentially we exchange poems and capture images to match the other’s verse. So I sent her a poem I had been working on for the past year and she sent me this beautiful piece that is below.

The timing couldn’t have been better: I had planned a trip to Sri Lanka’s hill country and really if I can’t be inspired going to that Garden of Eden I don’t deserve a camera – or to be writing poetry in the first place. But enough backstory, let’s get to the photo-poem exchange:

FINDING YOU 

Dusk,
Against a darkening grey sky.
This stubborn rain droplet on my window,
Sings a strange song,
About a dream in which you laughed
So hard all the pigeons flew away.

I don’t understand why I still
Don’t know
Your name.
But I know how I feel in your presence.
Beautiful.
Sacred.

Chained somewhere to a street lamp
Is my pride.
Caught underneath the roots of that tree
Is my fear.
That you’d never be found alive,
By me.

The sea once foamed at my feet,
And rolled out a shell shaped as your face.
Two decades and 21 days of knowing you exist,
Is not enough for me to breathe on.
If you stopped laughing in my dreams,
Perhaps I can, live.

You are not the song
The rain sang to the leaves,
That song was mine to sing.
They merely borrowed the chorus,
For the evening.

You are not the dusk peering from
Behind the veils of clouds,
That dusk is the backdrop of our unwritten story,
If we ever survive,
To write it.

The day our lives meet,
And I hear your laughter,
The sky will split asunder.
And the earth will shudder beneath us,
Its soil will form the words of our names.

Till then, I walk it brave, and Whole.
And Written.

VERSE:   Hayah IMAGES:   Theena Kumaragurunathan

My poem ‘Ghost Orchid’ and Hayah’s photos accompanying the words can be seen here.