Fall in

Title: Fall In

I want to fall in
so utterly, so ruinously
To know what it means to be alive.

They say love ends incomplete.  
Perhaps they never found the words.  
Perhaps it still waits, unspoken,  
a prayer held between heartbeats.

What was killed in me  
was the grace of staying
the quiet courage to linger.  
I’ve been racing the current,  
trading depth for speed,  
trying to outrun the river of days.

But I crave to fall in once,  
to the kind of feeling  
that makes the body forget its weight,  
that turns the sea into a sitar,  
that gathers birds into a midnight raga.  

This is the feeling poets drown in,  
whose end is not union, but offering.  
Its harvest is patience.  
It unmakes me and builds me anew
bone by bone, breath by breath.

Call it madness, call it myth,  
I’ll bow to any name
if only there exists a feeling in this world  
that stitches me back to living,  
that carves new paths through my thinking,  
that tunes my broken notes into music.

My restless soul has knocked on every door
has slept in the lap of mountains,  
has sat at the feet of monks,  
begging for the one thing that will say enough

What is it that will finally fill me?  
What is it whose arrival will make the world feel whole?  
My longing still burns,  
and yet I am dying of it.

Where does this feeling hide?  
Who can point to its door?  
I do not know.  
I am only a traveler,  
and the road is asking me to fall in.

Goldi Mishra