Self-Portrait Unrequited
There are nights when
winds make waves in the brain
without surging into thought.
I do not know that particle called love but
I imagine a lover’s kiss—light flits sullen on the eyelid like
mollusks floating in the deep, their own conclusions momentary.
Years weep, the rain roars
underwater. One quivers for
softness and succumbs to an impenetrable pearl.
Sibani Sen teaches creative writing and South Asian history. She has a PhD in Indology from Harvard University and an MFA from Boston University. Her current projects include forthcoming new poetry, a translation of an eighteenth-century epic from Sanskrit, Persian and Bengali, and a monograph on the Indian pre-modern poet Bharatchandra.