Poetry Finds You, but Where Do I Find Poetry?

I have found poems in stolen
glances of people who never
stopped to read the eyes.
In a barren land where a flower
still blooms with a hope to live
amidst the hate of the sun
that has soaked lives of many.
In the scribbled names on
benches, where a heart drawn
with that person’s name has
so many poems which
you never expressed.
In that dry leaf kept between
the pages of a half read novel
which somewhere stays in the
same page, where you found
a sad poem which didn’t let you
move ahead to complete it.
Poems are a way to break hearts,
to revisit places, to rethink
your decisions and pause
that smile which you hold
under the sleeves of your grief
but where do poems live?
Where do you find poems
breathing, living, smiling
just like humans, at times?

Somedays I feel, poems live
underneath the skin which hides
words of my irascible moments
where all I did was shut my room
and cry in silence. There, my poems
lived to come out of the wet tears
spilled on the pillow covers.

Somedays I feel, poems live on
the road less taken, the empty roads
where silence mumble the poems of
John Keats and welcome the autumn
leaves, which has poems breathing
to be read by the world.

And somedays, I feel poems live
invisible like the oxygen that lets
you breathe, and poems are a way
to find yourself in words of poets.
They make poets breathe
the words which are unseen,
unnoticed, unknown by people,
but find them in a dusty book
which speaks nothing but the truth,
you always wanted to know
about love, life, people and you.

Poems will find me just like
lovers find their hands touching
with longing. Poems will find me,
the way seeds find their way to
the fertile soils, that grow muted
voices. Poems will find me, the way
mom finds dad’s old photographs
and still recites his favourite song,
Abhi na jao chod kar.’ Poems will
find me. I will recite them on my skin
and fill my room with its aroma that
will smell like jasmine.

Someday, I will relive my poetry,
under my lovers lips, and tell him
that I gave birth to my poems,
but he gave birth to the words,
that longed for his lips.

Harshit Jalan is a 21-year-old Journalism student, who writes poems and articles on gender and queer representation. You can find Harshit on Instagram @harshitbreathingpoetry__

Featured image: Annie Spratt/Unsplash