Poetry

By

Trivarna Hariharan

Storytellers

I hear a knock on my rusted wooden door as the stars ascend a seamless sky.

It is the storyteller.

He tells me the stories of the night – by the night.

The moon caresses the Orion as I look up to see his verses

paint themselves upon the palms of the clusters that burn themselves out

tearlessly and with ease, everyone now and then.

I close my eyes. To hear the flicker of the sounds and sense the

intangible light that emanates from the entities whose names I have forgotten.

“Collapsed,” he whispers into my ears.

Then when we sit down to see the moon evanesce into a

nebulous fog behind the clouds, leaving the Orion behind, he

tells me how the stars that I see in the sky never wanted to become stars in the

first place.

“They wanted to become the moon. They couldn’t,” he says.

“What could they have become, if not stars, then?” I ask him.

He pauses for a bit before answering.

The rustle of the leaves fills up the solemn stillness of that moment.

“Storytellers,” he says softly.

Almost hums.

Long after he has left, I keep staring at the almost invisible

moon, the gigantic Orion and

the transient stars perched upon the unbroken sky, thinking of the

next verse I’d perhaps write tonight.

Trivarna Hariharan

Trivarna Hariharan is an author whose work appears in various literary magazines, zines and journals such as Textploit, Writers Asylum, Literature Studio, TheOriginalVanGoghsEarAnthology, A Penny for a Thought, Orange Almonds, The Bougainvillea Lit Road Magazine and elsewhere. She serves as the editor in chief at Inklette, and is the Head Officer for Journalism at Redefy. Her first poetry collection “Home and Other Places”, is being published by Nivasini Publishers, and is slated for a 2016 release.
She believes strongly in the power of art to bring about change.