Guilty, by Sheila Shrivastava

Precipice, by Shana & Robert ParkeHarrison (USA) 2015. Copyright of the artists 2015. Used with permission of the artists. Click image for artist site.

​Guilty
       
She is anchored with him on the precipice,
in unhappy matrimony.
Her beauty destroyed,
her lust laid to waste,
 
she is a poet with no reader.
 
Her ungrown leaves cannot glide
to the wind in reunion with the earth.
The compost cycle broken,
there will be no re-giving her self
as food for thought.
 
Her parched skin rakes the air,
barking mad with thirst,
but his treacherous hands have left her
with no mouth to drink
no cheeks to hold water
 
or teeth to bite sun.
 
Around her, the air stings with silence,
underscored by the rasping remains
of her dry twig tongues.
Tongues unable to speak on the cold metal taste
of his tool.
 
Her past has no future.
 
And yet she stands with him,
still,
his ghostly wife
exactly where he planted her.
 
One final red root, her first radicle
burning ever alive
from the core of his abuse,
dangles down
 
and writes her question
on the soilless
on the soulless
on the empty
                                        air
 
Standing on the tip of God’s pointed finger,
                                       how will any of us fall
                                                                  into his hand?
 
On her precipice, we all stand.
 
Accused.
 
Sheila Shrivastava
 
Born in Scotland to a German mother and Indian father, Sheila Shrivastava was raised in Massachusetts, educated in New York City and Philadelphia and lived, worked and mothered in Berlin for 20 years. She currently does the same while living, once again, in NYC. Her poetry is influenced by her wandering lifestyle and attention to the outside of the story. That is the region of the world where she has been issued her most frequently used, if imaginary, passport.