NAMARITA KATHAIT is a poet at heart who enjoys spoken word poetry on stage and healing through it. She has done masters in Creative Writing from the University of Westminster and English Literature from the University of Delhi. Being co-founder of a charity trust named Bhor, her poems deal with mental health, sense of loneliness, and relationships in the digital age.
—
A building in a sketchbook
Where old people live
with knitting needles and yarns
an old age centre was build
Walls ageing as the brown paint fading like water colours
The balconies protruded for wheelchairs
to find a good view of the neighbourhood.
A road with bicycles and speed breaks
where time is too tired for hustles
and every day on your zestful morning runs
unfailingly, you pause to breathe here
the greyness of the silence
and deceleration of the vehicles
a reflection of the imminency
and our limitations over destiny.
—
Name Plate
Ribbons tear
And fly to sky like kites
because they fear
the land isn’t their home.
Like the birds
build their nest in places
with no names
but they have the sky to own.
And I live in the walls
Of my temporary home
A father’s daughter to be given away
to another man’s nameplate
Asked to build her nest in spaces
in unknown places.
Tell me how different I’m from the ribbon that tears
or a bird who fears?
—
Burning Bridges
Would you show me inside your darkness
if I burn the bridges log by log
in the company of smoke and cigarettes
lighting fire on our heartbreak backlogs?
Would you take my hand
if I willfully open the gates
show you how tears become waterfalls
till our eyes together submerge the floodgates?
Would you trust me with your secrets
If I manage to get under your thick skin
Needling it with thorns of roses
Because everything beautiful has to bleed once?
Would you touch me again
If I lend my heart in the safe of your soul
bargain it for a witch’s love spell for your lover
hoping I can be that lover?
—
Waiting for the sun to rise
The crescents of the moon melt me
half to one-fourth
till I become a silhouette of itself
I, a moon child
regress every night
emotions tiding high and low
only sea reflects the inner me.
Sitting besides the sea
few hours to sunrise
I understood mania as the waves
deliriously aimed for the moon
I understood depression as the waves
dragged off the shore facing their limitation.
Exhausted by feeling too much
I, a moonchild
couldn’t wait any long
for the horizon to labour the sun
to wake up sleeping passion
and intensities like birds
impatient for flight cutting faded
cotton clouds with prisms of moisture
kalaidoscoping rainbow colours
all over my world.
I, a sunflower
ingress with every dawn
leaving the regrets in the dark
but the chances brought by another sunrise.