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‘Kindling healing’ and other poems by Kashiana Singh

1st March 20211st March 2021  Kashiana Singh

Kashiana Singh’s tightly knit poems, ‘Kindling healing’ and ‘The night spills’, explore night and day in all their haunting nuance and mesmerising movement.

Kindling healing 

I weave my love into 

Nerves, they weave

Taut through you, I

Form it so it stays

Minimal, not dead

Repeating itself like

A rhyme and refrain

Restraining you to a

State of ghazal, still

Piercing deep into a

Murmuring anxiety, it

Seeks not an escape

Nudging as you start

To be sharpened, in

Your own light, the

Candle in your eyes

Is my love, it alights?

I weave my love, into

Nerves that make a

Shrine in your body

It dissolves into your

Moon, a strained time

I am water, I pour seas

of quivering shadows, I

Wander into a night, a

grainy moon untangled

As I drench you with all

The healing gathered in

My whispering canopies

The night spills

I went for an evening walk today

Today a jagged corset was girdling a falling sky

Sky with a sun fixture benign, unenticing shadows

Shadows played into a peeling parchment, slowly fading

Fading quickly into oblivion, I limbless drift back again home

Home with my stained days coagulating, residual at the stumped base

Base of my spine, opens into every vertebra becoming a bleached fossil

Fossils scatter as I gather my fatigue into my knitted square tasseled blanket

Blanket with its delirious patches, a cohesive collection of my karmic medallions

Medallions strung on acreage outside as a cloud cracks open, noiseless a skunk sneaks

Sneaks into the night again, the night succumbing to a putrid stench  

Stench that sprays itself across the liquid of a pregnant moon

Moon, casts a violet filigreed light that I manoeuvre

Again, I went for an evening walk today

Today was a full moon night

About Kashiana Singh

Kashiana Singh lives in Chicago and embodies her TEDx talk theme of Work as Worship into her everyday. Her poetry collection, Shelling Peanuts and Stringing Words presents her voice as a participant and an observer. Her chapbook Crushed Anthills is a journey through 10 cities – a complex maze of remembrances to unravel. Her poems have been published on various platforms including Poets Reading the News, Visual Verse, Oddball Magazine, Café Dissensus, TurnPike Magazine, Inverse Journal. Kashiana is the winner of the 2020 Reuel International Poetry Award. She lives in Chicago and carries her various geographical homes within her poetry. For more information see Kashiana’s website here or follow her on Twitter @Kashianasingh

These poems were commissioned for our theme Night / Shift

For Night / Shift, we at Lucy Writers want to close our eyes to the rituals of the day and open them wide to the possibilities, sites, moves, sounds and forms visible only by night. Using Leonora Carrington’s work (see image above) as an entrance into this broad theme, we welcome writing – reviews, features, essays, creative non-fiction, (flash) fiction, poetry – and art work that explores night and its multiple shifts, liberating and otherwise, for womxn in particular.

Is night, as Carrington suggests, a feminine and feminist zone in itself, one which subverts daily codifications and rethinks day’s conditions? Or is night – also known as Nyx in Greek mythology, the maternal goddess of death, darkness, strife and sleep – still a period of discord, a stretch of time that threatens as much as it frees? For more information, see our Submissions & Contact page.

Feature image by Sara Rivers (follow Sara on Instagram @pixbysararivers).

Posted in Creative Writing, PoetryTagged: day, Kashiana Singh, love, Night / Shift, night shift, Night Sky, night time, Poet, Poetry

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