The sun is in a black mood today:
a viscous coal corona
extending this way and that.
Hapless planets, meanwhile,
entangled in their own dramas,
pleading desperate solace from
the distant stars.
But this is the ultimate truth:
for all their light,
these constellations
cannot be consolations.
They are but broken mirages
in an ink desert,
ideas banished from a country
which did not permit
them to exist.
And so they now haunt
this desolate land,
searching high and low
for a home,
a bed, a desk, a teacup
to call their own
only to find
nothing.
The sun has heard for long
the stars’ songs of lament,
their restless footsteps,
knowing better than anyone else
their exquisite loneliness.
But this foolish new pink planet,
alas, it knows nothing yet.
The days are still short there
and the nights languorously long,
still finding their color.
Stars thickly clot the sky,
bestowing silver ribbons of promise
and by that fickle light,
the innocent planet dreams,
this glorious big new rose
in a summer green garden
beneath a bare blue back sky,
setting the leaves on fire:
the stars somewhere in that sky too,
with their invisible, benevolent presence.
Inside an empty room,
a teacup shivers in a bar of sunlight,
the porcelain roses blushing red.
In that singular moment,
years of untarnished innocence,
the prospect of endless hope.
Priyanka Sacheti is a writer and poet based in Bangalore, India. She grew up in Sultanate of Oman and has previously lived in United Kingdom, and United States. She has been published in many publications such as Guardian, Literary Hub, Hyperallergic, and Popula with a special focus on art, gender, diaspora, and identity. Her literary work has appeared in The Brown Orient, Barren, Popshot, Berfrois, The Lunchticket, and Jaggery Lit as well as various anthologies, the most latest one being, March 2020, a collection of poems written in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. She’s currently working on a poetry collection and a nonfiction book.