Imagining Commonalities
"Rooftops, Brooklyn" Fidelia Bridges, 1867
by Debasish Mishra
The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For reach one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.
–Samuel Beckett
Imagine we’re all clinging to one breast
one mouth must withdraw for the other
and the other for another
so that the milk is shared
and also the lactating mother
the mouths deprived of milk
drink the tears till another turn of the gyre
we’re siblings for more than one reason
our cravings for love and carvings on skin
architecture of the same school
and our knowledge of universal truths
are derived from the same hearth
of history and habit our methods
of killing a mosquito and of making
love are tangents of a fixed
diameter our despair is tinted
like tears and our hopes are milk-white
the gloss of an undying flashlight
Debasish Mishra, PhD, teaches English Literature in the Department of English and Other European Languages, Dr. Harisingh Gour Central University, Sagar, India. He is the recipient of the 2019 Bharat Award of Literature and the 2017 Reuel International Best Upcoming Poet Prize. His recent poems have appeared in The Penn Review, Prism Review, White Wall Review, Inscape, and elsewhere. He has authored Lost in Obscurity and Other Stories (Book Street Publications, 2022).
