I am learning patience as I make a cut-out.
Of fishes and flowers,
the skirt of the poppy like the gill of the fish.
My fishes swim in some childhood home.
A memory flashes by like some extinguished flame.
I burn as I take hold of the lamp.
The pain in my spine is new,
my brain can take no more.

Through the window I watch my dreams
on the yellow projector of the tall building.
I am in a womb. My mother is sewing clothes.
My heart palpitates with the rhythm of the sewing machine,
the needle penetrates my heart.
It’s been hollow since then,
in the gap I allow my heartbreaks to rest
and sometimes grow.

The scene changes when the old lady comes in her balcony
she throw clothes on the ground
while her anger rises up.
I am in the real world now
watching the poppy plant,
as it floats with the wind.
summer shining on its petals.

I owe a womb now.
In this scene I am plural.
My fingers run across my abdomen,
through the wound that is healing.
There are stitches stapled in a pattern.
Criss cross. Criss cross.
My womb is empty,
poppies speak to it : it corresponds
like a newborn baby.
It breathes as the petals dance.
I almost choked with laughter.
The scene breaks.

My mother is sewing a red dress.
A soft velvet runs between her fingers,
needles mark their abstract territory
a shape takes over.
There is something strange about this quietness.
The purity of the sky, the unwanted isolated spring
Upsetting my stomach, it throws out every bite.

The beds are full. Nobody liked me before.
They do not know the reality.
I watch poppies speak to me,
their colour vanishes in the air,
there’s something sad about the things I am witnessing.

The walls dissolve instantly and I stand on my feet.
I want to be wet, like the road after the first rain.
I want to eat the poppies for their behaviour
renders my depression.
I freeze. I am alone. The death won’t come.

Circumstances are turning into cannibals,
they eat the souls, leaving bones to hang in mid air.
I burn insides of my mouth,
when I see the poppy plant turning white.
I am amazed at this momentous occasion,
aware of my mind getting dissected,
The operation bed is full of applause.
Poppies finally have a place to rest.

©Sameera Mansuri

NaPoWriMo 2020 Day 4. (Will post the other day poems soon)