Our love was an overnight bag

by Poulome Mitra Shaw

We never made promises
So that you never have to keep them.
We never had battles like the rest
So no such passionate interlude ever paved
There were no edible stories, no blossomed breeze
We were in blooms within
We had a fiction of you coming back home to me
In tie and cufflinks
And I had prose of me going back to all your boundless
caressing your inheritances
of phobias, of fears, of nothing,
of that little in between
precious and sterile.
We had a surviving little nothing over dissolved and advanced

You never allowed our bodies to stain over mind
I have been safe in there, as safe
as a woman would be once hurt and in need of a haven
And I never asked you to remove our moist soil
Unspoken, bound and betrayed within
Our love bore flowers and growth
Each morning since then I waited for the trees adorned
and the season's been nine months
Expecting and never pregnant
It's been so long since I have lost count of my yellow summers
And shawl wrapped winters
They were Ruskin's seven husbands
Loving, with rapid stubble
But now we have our rain and betrayal
In overnight bags, packed to discretely leave rooms
Who ever said we needed spoken and shed?
Who ever said I only believe in promises?
Whoever said my eyelashes won't break wet when you talk of letting go.
Whoever said
I never made you promises
And I never have to keep them.....

Our love was an overnight bag packed to leave rooms