MOHIT MITRA Poet Blank verse

Insinuance

—Where What Left Me Became Mine—



I walked, inebriated with dusk, through streets
whose erstwhile names had shed their stone; my steps
kept faith with roads that no longer knew my name.
Beneath a gate, a rhetorician pronounced
the vanished harmless: “Desist from grief.
What leaves, leaves nothing.” Yet a child, released
from her father's hand to cross the traffic, turned—
once—and the hand remained where hers had been.

A shopkeeper lowered iron over light;
a bus withdrew its red into the rain;
someone miscounted coins, then counted twice.
The blithe world did not pause. Its indifference
seemed almost merciful—until the sky
withdrew into a stone, and upward fell
a star, as though the heavens had forgotten
which way eternity was meant to go.

The edifice of certainty inclined—
not from its stones, but names engraved in them.
One syllable went numb; another cracked
the mortar. What had vanished entered grain.
The rhetorician ceased. His mouth, half-open,
could find no jurisdiction for the dark.

I thought of letters folded into books,
bread cooling beside a vacant chair,
the last train thinning beyond the signal—then
I understood: the hand that cannot keep
its hold is altered by the thing released.
Not hollowed—changed: the unseen pressure moves
through living matter as a root through stone,
until the wound becomes the shape it proves.

Let rhetoricians append their learned gloss;
let tonsorial and sartorial certainty
dress relinquishment in ceremonial light.
I shall not name the vanished “gone” again.
That word is poor. The dead are not diminished
because our tongues have ceased to reach them.

For possession ends where possession claims
itself complete; what leaves us does not fade
into the air, but enters what remains—
a pressure without footprint, altering stone,
until the hand forgets what it once held
and finds the shape of absence in its own.

What relinquishes us, insinuates.

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