BREAKING FROM PAST

Fighting with his ghosts, 
intimate dirt, 
disseminating pain 
he was going home. 

Finding a panic room 
in pectorals, for numbness of toes, 
lifting the door of burden 
in dying vision, 

his father comes in daylight 
of old age, climbing the stairs 
of bones, swaying 
like an ash tree in frost. 

One counts the annual rings of 
old trunks, depicting 
mighty happenings, black and white 
green summers of choked life, 

tasting one’s own decline, filling the 
cups of rosemary, a child learns to speak 
thatched words of wasted birth in 
tune with younger years of grief.

Satish Verma