MOHIT MITRA Poet Rhyme

At One-and-Twenty: A Rite for Poetry Soup

 
 At one-and-twenty years the cauldron sings,
 Not sound, but time condensed from perished things:
 From vows worn thin as hinges in the rain,
 From skylarks stitched to dusk with threaded pain.
 
 From ploughshares’ brows still dark with borrowed loam,
 Here syllables took weight; here grief made home
 Inside the mouth, where utterance once failed,
 And silence learned the load it had inhaled.
 
 No chapel this of lacquered wit or pose,
 Where praise repeats what already it knows;
 But hearth and weather both, where voices came
 Unhoused, uncredentialed, scorched, yet flame.
 
 Here meter bent its law to keep its faith;
 Here sense arrived by fracture, not by swathe;
 Thought surfaced like a bone the field laid bare—
 Uncleaned, unnamed, yet truer for the air.
 
 Metaphor was not adornment here,
 But seed flung blind into a brutal year;
 It split by waiting, not by will to bloom,
 And learned the patience of a narrowed room.
 
     Then language failed—no trope could hold the part;
     A sentence broke, and history went dark.
     What should have stood here does not stand at all:
     Absence itself completes the interval.
 
 O vessel—thou hast held what hands refuse:
 A child’s erased name learning how to bruise,
 A prayer that lived though belief withdrew,
 Wars folded small enough to make them true.
 
 Here love stood stripped of promise, kept its breath,
 Not spared from loss, but trained to walk with death;
 Here joy arrived without its bright disguise,
 A thing that lived by not explaining why.
 
 Now mark the hour: the broth runs dark with years,
 Ferments of awe, distillments born of fears;
 Yet still it feeds. Still rises, line by line,
 What mouths were schooled too early to resign.
 
 Not all who drank were comforted or spared;
 Some left more wounded than when first they dared;
 Yet truer wounds were named, and naming stayed
 Where false relief would only have betrayed.
 
 Drink, then—not to be filled, but to be shown
 The hunger is the marrow, not the bone.
 So long as one true line burns without plea,
 The feast endures. The cost is what we see.

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