The Odyssey of a Tear – Delhi Poetry Slam

The Odyssey of a Tear

By Girish Saraf Bendke

In depths where silent storms reside,  
A brine-born bead begins its glide—  
A crystal forged from sorrow’s breath,  
A liquid sigh, defying death.  

It swells, a world in miniature,  
A globe of grief, both faint and pure;  
The eye’s own sky, now overcast,  
Holds oceans in a vault of glass.  

It quivers, poised on Reason’s ledge,  
A fragile bridge ‘twixt heart and edge;  
Like Saturn’s ring, it clings, it gleams,  
A prism stitching fractured dreams.  

Then—plunges! Down the cheek’s curved slope,  
A comet trailing trails of hope;  
A rebel river, warm and wild,  
It carves a path for truths exiled.  

Does it lament what lips won’t name?  
Or baptize wounds too raw to claim?  
Each salt-streak script, a poet’s verse,  
A language bones can’t cage or curse.  

It falls not as defeat’s weak slave,  
But as a knight who rides the wave—  
To crash upon the shore of skin,  
Where air will claim where it’s been.  

Now dried, a phantom on the floor,  
A diamond shed by feeling’s core;  
Yet in its wake, the soul feels light—  
A star released to pierce the night.  

So let it flow, this liquid lore,  
The heart’s own tide, the spirit’s roar:  
One tear, a cosmos—brief, entire—  
A monsoon housed in quicksilver.


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