Purvi Shah
Mira unfurls her hair into a bell when – from this ringing – mirror emerges
Such dark lip of the beloved
in swirl of untangled
strand,
revealed.
Here, a mirror’s black
spark, shine
of obsidian
unspooled from earth’s
innermost core.
Your heart too
bore origin here. Shaken,
see a mantle
scattering,
or hundred clappers thrumming heart’s desires –
in heat your fingers clamoring skirt of fires.
In each thumb’s stroke, streams of sounds erupt, bringing
not burn but truth’s divinations. Delight:
not left & right of tresses shorn & swept
but herald pasts &
horizons/futures &
promisings. Listen
to the peal of bloom in your mouth.
In either clang
or clatter/sojourn
or quest, you land
at nape of neck, cupping this struck spilling
into your trembling hands, arcing your lips
into the darkest fountain, finding here trill
& original light, finding here
that which first brought you – your own sight.
Purvi Shah’s debut poetry book, Terrain Tracks, published by New Rivers Press in 2006, was nominated for the 2007 Asian American Writers’ Workshop Members’ Choice Award. Her work has been published in numerous journals and anthologies including Descant, Drunken Boat, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indivisible, The Massachusetts Review, and Nimrod. She works as a non-profit consultant and contributes to the Huffington Post.