On Valentine's Day
They ask me
Am I in love
I had not
I wasI am not
Will not be.
The past seems now
pointless as the pictures
in my wedding album
where the bride and groom
were once caught in a race
with sealed promises
on the lips of the groom
and vagrant hopes
in the eyes of the bride-
Three two one…
the bride racing halfway
through the starting point
not seeing him tag along
ending her expectations half-way
waiting for him to catch up-
but-
he never came.
The album returns
now content to be where it is-
locked in a remote past.
Hurt so many times
she became accustomed to it
dressing it each time
Herself
And then the hurt began
to grow in her
Then it grew into her
Now she was the hurt
You couldn’t tell apart
from her and the hurt…
Hert.
The pain is not the misery now
It is the scary lack of feel
the unsounded numbness
the vacant heart
that lives but no longer feels.
Yes,love had once
knocked on my door
And the doors were wide open
frantically forcefully fanatically
The sounds have now fled
but the echoes are still there.
Rukhaya MK, literary critic, poet and academician, has published her works in anthologies and journals. An award-winning writer, she has won accolades in writing at the university level, state level, national level and international level. The prizes pertain to essay writing, film criticism, versification, story-writing, screenplay-writing and slogan writing. She has also won prizes in painting, elocution and computer designing. Rukhaya is also editor of a national collection of poems called Inklinks, and on the editorial board of the journal, Discourse.
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