ambulance season

weekly poem | one from my pandemic archives

I wrote this poem in the thick of the pandemic and lockdown, back when it felt like a season of death was upon us. Last night, I was listening to this video essay on death by Philosophy Tube, and thinking about how seasons of death only arrive, never end. The politics of who gets to live and who gets to die is perhaps too complex for me to write about. Which is why I wrote about flowers instead. I suppose it is all related in the end. Flowers. Politics. Life. Death. With that, let’s begin.

This poem previously appeared on my Substack and in Indian Review.

ambulance season

the jasmine flowers bloomed last night

their cold white bodies  

       opening and opening 

into the flat palm of the dark. 

***

if love exists, maybe it is like this; an unfurling 

that takes place in silence. 

***

now it is morning. 10 AM sun. flakes of dust in the warm air. 

I crouch down to greet the flowers 

     they sway, back and forth, back and forth in the wind, 

heads shaking as though with laughter, as though they could lift 

their small mouths to the sky. 

***

                                                  how badly I want 

to join them, laugh in the secret way of flowers, 

plunge my limbs into soil, press my ears to the damp earth 

      and laugh. but I am tired. it is almost July now. the months

arrived like train carriages, all at once. all summer 

I lay on my side and listened to the sound 

of ambulance sirens rising through the rain. 

soon our flowers will die; petals coming undone, 

floating down to the earth. and once again

I will find myself unable to mourn. 

***

next season, only the flowers will return to us. 

(nighttime. rust in the city sky. a single jasmine bud 

curls open; latticed by stray light.) 

by then, we will be half asleep. in this dark

we too unfurl in our own way; 

each of us falling into our own private sleep, 

but held by the same silence. 

in and out of broad shadows, our bodies reach 

for each other, even while dreaming.

***

now we will sleep all through July. and we will go on 

like this, outliving all our flowers, 

for we still have other seasons - 

to live and die in. 

---

If you’re going to read one thing on Substack today…

… Read

Mohammed Mohisen

, who writes from Gaza.

I’ll be back with more writing next week. Until then, take care.

Love,

Anagha