Aalok Thakkar: Poetry

On Inertia

I.

The mattress takes the burden of my hip,
I seem to have forgotten how to move.
The years have dried the words upon my lip;
I live inside a fact I cannot prove.

No hand arrives to break the waiting air,
No charge to wake the silence in my skin.
I am a drought no season comes to bear,
A hollow pulling all the hollow in.

By law, a touch alone can shift the weight,
For nothing moves unless a force is laid.
The silence is a wire drawn tight and straight,
A pleading ache that I cannot evade.

No warmth has crossed this room for years,
Inertia turns to bitter salt and tears.

II.

I marked this heavy stone last year,
When winter skies were cold and clear,
This season too it holds the ground,
Without a tremor or a sound.

It lacks the will to rise and go,
Or shake away the drifting snow.
It only waits for some intent—
A sudden hand, an accident.

But no one walks the lonely crest,
To put its stillness to the test.
And so it keeps the law of rest:
Untouched, untroubled, and unpressed.