Too Soon For Goodbye A Poem By: Ishrat Chahal
Giovanni Rios Castro's 'Goodbye I Left'. Paint on Canvas, 2018.
I don’t even know if it hit me at all;
how instead of striking me like lightning,
it slowly percolated through the diaphanous tissues
of my perfectly-pale blue sky.
It seems like the most plausible explanation,
because how else did I not notice
The sudden decline in digits?
How the neatly-organized pockets in my brain were being torn apart, one by one?
Or how, all of a sudden, I was left a child in the world of ruthless giants?
I gripped so tightly to myself that my knuckles must’ve turned snow-white
I thrashed.
I pleaded.
I wept.
But it was merciless
just as it had come,
it slowly emptied me of myself,
deprived me of my innocence,
extracted my very soul; left a phantom scar where I had once thrived,
and returned back to the sky
savouring greedily all of me it took with it.
Give it back, I wanted to yell,
I can’t live without what you’ve taken away.
Now the sky hangs over me, torn and bloody;
taunting,
tantalizing —
The only remembrance;
a scar of a life long gone.