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Short Poem: God

Eventually, my ideas of an all-powerful yet inherently benevolent entity called God turned into the mythical boulder crushing the shape of my Sisyphean mind.

Shantashree Mohanty

Updated on: 18 February 2023 8:13 am

Under an open sky...

Long before you came along
and moved me to write about love and longing,
I used to write about God.
I would pick up fragments from the
undulated observations made in the arts of
Hesse and Bergman
and expand on their causal implications.

Every now and then I’d pick up a book
Like ‘What God Wants’ or
‘Believe in the God who believes in you’
and build a malleable perspective
to practice austerity of Ambition.

Eventually my ideas of an all powerful
yet inherently benevolent entity called God
turned into the mythical boulder
crushing the shape of my Sisyphean mind.

Conservative nuclear families
with bare minimum resources
do not have the capacity to
encourage meaningful relationships
?in the lives of their children.
And I, with my high emotional quotient
and anxious deprivations
having failed to forge productive friendships,
gravitated towards the unbridled fixations of romantic entanglements;
which often were frivolous, sad
and requisitive of manufactured sincerity.
Yet, while I was a part of these entanglements.
I never wrote about them.

Instead, I wrote about Forough Farrokhzad
or even how much I hated my music lessons
and I wrote about God.

In retrospect,
on some days, God spoke through
half-baked miracles
when School declared a rainy day
and I did not have to sit through
the subtle misogyny of my math teacher.

On some days, God dispelled
my despair when my college lab partner
let me copy her statistics homework
just so I could get out early
and read Louise Gluck in the bike stand.

God left when my Cat died
leaving a void of her size
in my ailing heart.
But shortly came back as
my mother’s radiant smile
when they put a gold medal
around my clue-less neck
on Graduation Day.

God kept hovering in the
back-ground somewhere
guest-appearing once in a while
in my sporadic journaling
which after a debilitating mental breakdown at 24,
stopped altogether indefinitely…
until of course, you came along,
(Relieving God, a wee bit)
and moved me to write about love and longing.