Nina Sudhakar

We Are Not Made for Sea But for Sky

Mid-afternoon the waves pull back
the covers & force us to reckon with

the suddenly nude shoreline, exposed
grains & foolishly inscribed footsteps,

crustaceans reaching antennae into the
sunshine’s abyss. Rendering us all blinking,

half-blind, remembering how a day inevitably
finds us stripped naked at its end. It doesn’t

take much to recall the milkiness of an
underwater pulse, a vague & sweeping swell

like the world’s only truth glimpsed through
the clouded murk of a liquid curtain. The time

has come to hold our breaths, to swim for a
dim light in the distance, to throw the ocean

off our shoulders. I know we yearned for a
clean slice of oxygen, for unencumbered

breath. For the sacred placation of filmy
clouds, for that voidless, depthless expanse

of blue. Only beneath do I feel the low
throb-hum that turns float to churn, blur

to clarity, that tells me I’d do anything
to reach a solitary, untroubled surface.
 

Nina Sudhakar, an Indian-American writer and lawyer, won the Bird’s Thumb 2017 Poetry Chapbook Contest and her manuscript Matriarchetypes is forthcoming later this year. Her poems have appeared in Rising Phoenix Review and TRACK//FOUR. website