Power Cut

By Joanna George

It’s eleven p.m as we pause, our video-call for a rest, 
the power will be severed in your place 
for about an hour – a ritual these days you say;
for the people of your village to walk on their terrace,
counting the stars and acknowledging the changing climate.
Like the lamp of  Makaravilaku 
I will be visible on your phone screen you say and so 
we wait for the clock to strike twelve with the street lights 
for the power to turn it on again. 
Now, the villagers be gone back to their rooms 
locking the starry skies outside their doors to sleep 
watching the whirring fan on their dark blank ceilings,
forgetting for another night, the altered climate.
We slowly unfold our day from the corners of the same map
folding this large distance between our borders to a virtual nothing;
as our incidents of this mundane day reach the shore 
one after the other like waves hitting the live sea at night.
And we dare speak forgetting the village people 
behind their curtains watching you, 
forgetting my parents sleeping below, 
forgetting the physical existence of distance between us 
we speak connected by the same starry ocean country we share,
unlike the daytime where the network digs our conversations so similar 
to a rodent’s search for roots and burrows, 
ending in bricks and blocks, statued silences of grim reality.

Joanna George (She/Her) is a research student at Pondicherry University. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, West Trestle Review, Honey Literary, Paddler Press, Isele Magazine, Lumiere Review and others. She tweets at j_leaseofhope.