✷
I can live now but not
without the broken bread
and bleeding vine
beyond the womb
and the half
clock and sands,
and the coffin of
the Hammer and Sickle.
Now dreams explode into
a white bonfire, flutter
with the strength of humility
to nest in that love that
encloses me with thorns
that hallow a death,
open the eyes of secret silences
of time that stood against
Earth’s celebrated mausoleums.
The darkness that trickles down my eyes
today in sack-cloth as milk, can curdle
the honey of that perennial venom.
From the wild grass at the feet of
the Angel of grief Rome, a cluster
of life humbly waits for the sun.
✷
Sreekanth Kopuri Ph.D. is an Indian poet and professor from Machilipatnam. He is the current poetry editor for The AutoEthnographer and a 2023 Pushcart Prize nominee. He has recited his poetry in Oxford, John Hopkins, Heinrich Heine, Caen, Banja Luka, and elsewhere. His poems have appeared in Two Thirds North, Arkansan Review, A Honest Ulsterman, San Antonio Review, Tulsa Review, Expanded Field, South Broadway Journal, Vayavya, American Plants & Poetry, Nebraska Writers Guild, Poetry San Jose, and Oddball Magazine, to mention a few. His forthcoming book From an Indian Diary was a finalist for the Eyelands Book Award 2022 and his book Poems of the Void was the winner of Golden Book 2022.
