The Gravedigger’s Soliloquy
Photo: Karan Madhok
Poem: ‘someone once said / the soul is lighter than breath / but the soil keeps secrets / the sky cannot hold.’
Dust drips
from my palms
like exhausted prayers
(there is no hymn here)
the earth exhales
in broken syllables
names,
years,
hunger.
I bend,
spade sinking into
the soft machinery of oblivion.
someone once said
the soul is lighter than breath
but the earth keeps secrets
the sky cannot hold.
listen to
the worms writing histories
in cursive tunnels,
archiving sorrow
grain
by
grain.
a button,
a tooth,
a rusted coin:
evidence of living,
proof of leaving.
I pause,
and the silence folds into me
like a damp cloth.
at the distance
a dog barks at nothing,
a crow rehearses elegies,
and the wind
refuses translation.
Perhaps,
I am digging
my own absence.
but I keep shovelling
the earth,
breath,
void.
somewhere beneath,
even the stones
have begun
to dream.
***
Anju Devadas R D currently works as a Guest Faculty in the Department of English at Pondicherry University. A budding poet, her work has appeared in The Madras Courier, LittCrit, Feminism In India, and other journals and magazines. Her creative and critical writing moves between the personal and the cultural, drawing on confessional and feminist traditions. You can find her on Instagram: @unbearable_lightnessof_being and X: @anju_devadas.
