Poetry by Ritiksha Sharma

            ​  stanze CC



Mindgraph 

Parchments of memory held in my hand,
A photograph
So, I looked at her, head down wide-eyed,
A photograph of her
Sitting beside herself; a subtle grin on her lips,
something funny perhaps,
A photograph of us.
 
I knew her once I think
A face of calm; like tea leaves soaked in water,
circling away in a thoughtful daze; a body of
struggle, eyes inquisitive, clear to the bone. She saw
me once and there have been quagmires aplenty since;
I think I know her still.
 
“Mastermind” – they said and Man! She was!
Because unlike scripts that others wrote for her
she was the master of her own mind.
A cerebral cortex of repute, honed in bouts of
furious deliberation with others, with herself,
with the world, with the word.
 
You don’t see the lives she has lived
in the fading shades of this memory. You
won’t, you can’t, she won’t let you.
She sat staking out a diary of your conventions;
rewrote it all in a page, and lived it for you to see.
Open her up, see how she bled under once,
rippling tornado, fragile like a bomb.
 
You won’t, because you can’t. I won’t let you.

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Ritiksha Sharma holds a Master of Arts in History from the University of Delhi, India. She is interested in the caliginous splinters of how the mind comprehends and engages with abstract experiences. Her work has appeared in the Indian Review and Indian Periodical.