Where can you find the Stars
A poem by Mohana Talapatra

Where can you find the Stars

Stars don’t come here anymore

into the smoky magenta sky of the city
you don’t yet call “home” –
with its blinking traffic lights
and the occasional night ambulance
sending a piercing red ray of disquiet
onto your kitchen table,
slicing open summer plums
in a splatter of red-purple blood
made gold
in the watery halo of yellow street lights
broken four-ways by the window

You spoke of the stars once,
a long time ago.
where there was a river – slow, deep,
and dark
and the croaking of frogs in
a steady metronome,
somewhere on its banks;
banks glittering with fireflies
sated for the night
with swallowed stars;

and that’s when I realized
why you don’t speak of the stars
anymore

Because they still hide in
little firefly bellies
next to your river,
dancing to a metronome
of two half-notes –
“don’t go; don’t go”

About the Author:

Mohana Talapatra is a Climate Change consultant by day, and a poet and water-colorist by night. She was last published by Harper Collins (India), during the pandemic, as part of a unique crowd-sourced novella initiative, that brought nine writers out of their forced isolation into penning a single, collaborative story of nine chapters. Poetry, however, remains her first love; and Mohana is currently working on a poetry anthology of her own. She loves the creative arts, travelling and food, in almost that order.

She lives in New Delhi, and can often be found in little Himalayan hamlets, talking with shaggy mountain dogs on obscure hiking trails.

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