Where Your Sky Meets my Ocean

I looked out the window

where the sky and the ocean met

between them there lay a horizontal line--

Kshitij, you, the horizon,

and I, the suspended marginal line

trying to reach you,

but my songs are drowned

in the ripples of the ocean.

The page of the leather-bound journal

stared at me with your immaculate calligraphic message:

To my love, my friend, my wife

who has given me thirty-five

years of cherished memories –

may we have many more…

for a long time, those words stood

as the only anchor holding me to this earth

but I saw you in the empty pages of the journal

as always encouraging, and inspiring me:

Fill it up, my love with your verses

that I left unsaid.

The social hive we built--

friends and relatives who once hovered around

like bees in a beehive, withered away one by one,

they were there only for your dynamic light,

in my empty space I tried to find myself.

The colorless canvas of the Elysium

where you lived Invited me to fill it up

with the colors of our love

and the rhythms of the melodies of the ripples.

I am the horizontal line

where your sky meets my ocean,

I used to blend in your colors,

but now I fill the canvas with my own colors and words,

and I paint the blues with silver shades of the moon.

Dr. Meenakshi Mohan (USA) is an internationally published writer, scholar, art critic, children's writer, painter, and poet. She is on the editorial Committee for Inquiry in Education, a peer-reviewed journal published by National Louis University, Chicago, Illinois. She is an Advisory Editor for Confluence, UK. Meenakshi received the Setu and Panorama International Awards for Excellence in Literature. Her book, Symphonies of Life, won the Sudesh Kamra Memorial Award for the best debut poetry book at the Bhasha and Beyond Literary Festival, Pune. Meenakshi lives in the USA.