Time is a Sculptor: Five Poems by Vinita Agrawal
Photo: Karan Madhok
‘The valley hums every summer— / the murmur of a year’s worth of wounds. // It seems nature remembers / what we’ve have tried to bury.’
What The Mountains Keep
We could be snow-crowned peaks
or shadowed valleys, within ourselves.
Jagged cliffs of stillness,
or breath hanging on a single thread.
The moon’s glow grazes the edge of night,
peaks fragment in the wake of standing eternal.
The lone pine, gnarled and weathered,
leans tiredly, gently, towards a void.
The valley hums every summer—
the murmur of a year’s worth of wounds.
It seems nature remembers
what we’ve have tried to bury.
*
The Unspoken Hymn of Trees
Even if I tried,
I couldn’t talk to the skies
the way trees did.
When trees spoke to the blue,
they unfurled their branches
like ancient maps,
as if they had much to confide
to the firmament.
Every leaf a sigil,
warding off silence.
The earth’s gladness
polished onto leaves,
wind used as cloth.
I could spend a lifetime
listening to the rustle of leaves.
All the trees I knew,
held fast their shadows
in the brightest hours of noon,
as if the essence of
root, branches, canopy,
was as much in the shadows
as in the form.
Trees looked best
in the morning,
covered with diamond
tiaras of dew,
swaying gently
to the hymn of dawn.
Watching them,
I’d feel my throat choke-up
to the air’s fluted magic.
Everything would become one;
the trees, the dawn, the breeze,
my breath.
*
The Sculptor
If you visit a grove repeatedly
it guides you to clarity,
just as a river,
speaks repeatedly to a single stone.
Wherever you stand,
water carves a path,
it whispers names of trees
in the language of roots.
Time is a sculptor—
even stones learn to bend,
wearing the wind’s patience,
becoming dust.
Those who carry
moss on their backs
like a green flame,
were once authors of canyons.
*
Rain
The rain today
is not the kind that pours,
but the kind that lingers—
tapping the roof
like a hesitant typewriter,
sliding down the window
like a forgotten envelope
left on the floor.
In the undergrowth,
rising from the rot.
A lone flower survives,
pale and strange.
Once it was a lily,
white as snow,
I think of how the rain falls,
strand over strand,
the way I once braided plastic
into a lanyard,
a thing meant to hold something,
though I never knew what.
And what do I offer in return?
A cupped palm, a tilted face,
a child’s belief
that standing in the rain
with nothing to give,
is enough.
Here, I say,
as if the sky could hear—
here is my smallness,
my open hand.
*
Teach Me, Bulbul
You arrive, like light rain
among the branches,
a flicker of shadow
dipped in wine-dark down,
a bruise of ash-brown feathers
among the leaves,
a smudge of wings
against the sun.
Your throat
a flute, trembling with songs.
You tilt your head,
the black bead of your eye
holds the sky.
You bury your beak
in the blossoms,
drinking what they offer.
The tree sheds its flowers
without sound,
once you’ve
had your fill.
Your hunger, a stapler
keeping flowers
on the boughs.
Bulbul, teach me
how to be the tree—
to bloom and break
and still know how to rise,
to hold the thorns,
the fruit, the memory,
and wear my wounds
as wings to the skies.
Teach me, Bulbul,
to be like you
a ripple of shade,
honey-soft and warm,
your throat
a quivering cup
of unsung hymns.
Teach me.
***
Vinita Agrawal lives in Indore, India. She has authored six books of poetry and edited two anthologies on climate change. She is the recipient of the Jayanta Mahapatra National Award for Literature 2024, the Proverse Prize Hongkong 2021, the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2018 and the Gayatri GaMarsh Memorial Award for Literary Excellence, USA, 2015. She co-edits the Yearbook series of Indian Poetry in English. She was former Poetry Editor with Usawa Literary Review. She has been published in Global South, Pratik, Mascara Review, Indian Literature, Asian Cha, Voice and Verse, The Bombay Literary Magazine and the Knopf Newsletter among others. She is on the Advisory Board of the Tagore Literary Prize. You can find her on Twitter: @vinita65 and Instagram: @vinitaagrawal18.
