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Poems

Letter to the Moor - [ Review ]
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Letter to the Moor

by Reetika Vazirani

How could I have ignored you
in my father's house the evenings you came
for dinner and to talk about wars.
I loved those heroics.
But don't you understand
they are mine too.
If I speak of this bluntly

they'll call me a whore, Bianca's twin, drunk on
cheap infatuation. So let them talk.
I have no words to limn interior
climates. Nights! My arm
clutches your dark brightness
your arm on my paler arm.

What are these skins if not ourselves?
One husband, one wife; that is how I see
our marriage. But to please poets we say
moons need pitch to be seen.
Midnight needs the moon
to stitch its huge cloak of wonders.

Poetry and living! What combinations!
Two skins and one per citizen. In books
black is beast. I'm Mary, alabaster,
I'm the virgin dewlike
morning flush. A flat world
but I roamed it hungrily.

From limb to limb I climbed men in my mind,
suitor after suitor, next in line for
Brabantio's daughter: men smiled: we sometimes
talked of our childhoods
in Venice. I felt nothing.
So let them call me a whore,

say I deceived as much as I'm deceived,
call you pornographic.
Who conquered whom, then, and what's the war now?
A wolfish wish for days
for this hunger to keep
alighting and your grip

to catch my skin's stark shattering.
My heart is subdued and our bodies lock.
Break my fall, I give it all up to you.
And if I wished heaven

had made me a man, I
take back the words. I've given

everything to keep me as I am. Go
now I'll keep missing you like strong weather.
I have your handkerchief of strawberries
to blot my tears. I won't
cry. Fierce holds have their ways.
I'll outlast the ancient,

jealous disapprovals. (What bred them?)
I'll wait out storms and floods and the flights'
delays. I have one wish, Othello
call it what you will love,
I call it a life. . .

Reetika Vazirani

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Letter to the Moor

Added on: 18-Nov-2009 Hits: 30