[sooner or later the chrysalis of my belonging will be broken]
'Always maybe. She was always maybeing.' - Don DeLillo
it is a seasonal question
is the first leaf to fall from a tree the first
one that grew
the tree is not a crochet of nerves
not a rootwork of damnation
not me
isn't this body a landfill
always
maybeing in the many-petalled gaze
What the Poet Says
[sooner or later the chrysalis of my belonging will be broken] happened because I found myself at the confluence of a book, Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist, and a nonnative tree in pink bloom, outside the glass building of Anna Centenary Library in Chennai. There were questions in the local media about the efficacy of such species. And there I was, a poet born and bred in the soil, struggling with my sense of self after a visceral heartbreak, knowing that the only place I felt kinship with, the only place I belonged to, was the page, a white space as alienating as the brown earth would have been for the nonnative tree; and yet. And yet.
summa iru could be a dog whistle.