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Dhruv Maheshwari Poem
The door is open.
It has been open for three days.
The sky outside is an endless,
terrifying blue,
a ceiling with no rafters,
a sprawling room with no corners
to press my back against when
the shadows stretch.
The poets outside write sweeping
verses about my clipped wings.
They weep for my songs of sorrow
behind iron bars,
projecting their own claustrophobia
onto my feathers.
They don't understand that the bars are ribs,
and I am the heart suspended inside.
If you crack the ribs wide open to
the wind,
the heart does not suddenly sprout wings and soar.
It is exposed. It stops beating.
I hop to the threshold, look at the
boundless, hungry sky,
and pull the little brass door shut with my beak.
Click.
Ah.
Freedom.
Copyright © Dhruv Maheshwari | Year Posted 2026
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Details |
Dhruv Maheshwari Poem
They sing of the blanket of snow.
(A blanket, after all, is meant to smother.)
They toast to the pristine white, the slate wiped clean,
the hushed and holy silence of the frost.
But white is not clean; it is merely greedy.
It eats the sharp edges of the driveway,
it swallows the wrought-iron fence,
it erases the stray cat’s frantic footprints.
The neighborhood applauds the theft
and calls it peace.
Give me the bruised purple of a frozen plum.
Give me the ugly, skeletal reach of the oak
refusing to drop its last dead leaf.
They say the red holly berry is a mark of festive cheer,
a quaint little ornament for the mantle.
I say it is a puncture wound in the canvas.
It is the earth bleeding through the bandage,
gasping,
I am still here under all this quiet.
Copyright © Dhruv Maheshwari | Year Posted 2026
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Details |
Dhruv Maheshwari Poem
(Fireflies dance in a circle
In barren shrubs, alone.
But I am not there.
New highways of
My city calls me home,
But I am not there.)
Flowers must have sprung
In the spring along the Hesco site,
I was fourteen with a friend there
Sixteen in a rainy ride,
I turned seventeen there with my beloved.
nineteen and I yearn for it’s sight.
Winterline sneaks out in the evening,
The sky sheds color till twilight,
In my ear, echoes call for long walks
And conversations in the absence of light.
an old couple walks there still,
I miss watching the love stroll of autumn nights.
(A road circles back to my school,
But I won’t be there,
Mother’s voice trembles in my absence,
But I won’t be there)
Copyright © Dhruv Maheshwari | Year Posted 2026
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