Four tea cups lay unattended since Mittag
– on the black, bedraggled table in the canteen.
You and I – drinking each other in—
Slow, dainty sips. Each
tea cup is empty and ready to be refilled
But you don’t.
Instead, you play with it.
Your fingers hold them with dexterity – unforgiving,
Entangling,
Timorously masking the quarks and leptons of emotions camouflaged—
Within the empty tea cup.
You endeavor to drown me—your eyes–
carry Lake Guatavita and I,
a trifling wanderer questing El Dorado.
The afternoon passes by—
Ophelia, drowning
You don’t finish your tea. Still.
Until–
I drown, with each sip,
In Lake Guatavita.
Irtika Kazi hails from Pune, India. She works in a renowned automobile brand in India and is a Poet by passion. Her poem “A Call from the Alpines” written in Shakespearean English, got published in YuGen literary magazine in July 2017. Some of her poems will be published in The Indian Literature Magazine of Sahitya Akademi. Her poem “A hope to bloom” was featured in Duane Vorhees’s poetry blog. Her poem “The Odyssey” was exhibited in the Museum of Goa for a poetry exhibit. “A Call from the Alpines” and “A hope to bloom” were published in the Brown Girl magazine of Houston, Texas in September 2017. Her poem “Icarus and the Ugarit Eclipse” got published on the Spillwords Press site. Further to that, her poem “Sunrise” was published in the anthology ‘Fragrance of Asia’ by Vishwakarma Publications in January 2018.
