"Outside the Citadel" by Aparna Sanyal

Outside the Citadel

Aparna Sanyal  

At the valley’s edge, the citadel towers, forbidding. 

Dark, mossy cracks rain-slick, 

nestle in centuries of smoothened 

"Citadel" Watercolor on Paper
By J. Artemus Gordon

stone and pebbles, 

mortared by sweat, song and belonging.

Triumphant thunder booms, lightning cracks and 

in the cracks, we see the pore-less granite

rise into an infinite sky. 

It reaches beyond us.

It frustrates our every attempt

to scale, 

breach even a rat’s hole, seep liquefied 

into it through even miraculous capillary action. 

We are desolate, 

like millions before and billions to come, 

we want to leave the fray, 

our dreams un-summited, left in a pile 

at the gate, lit by weeping candles and 

enshrined by the jewels we’ve shed. 

But 

as we make this mixed temple of our tributes, 

a bonfire without fire lights our faces. 

It is absorbed sudden, in a flash of percipience

into our souls.

So, at the gate steps, we make our Mecca. 

Gems hewn from the mines of our souls are

the mosaic overlaying the citadel wall. 

Dolls’ processions and parades of 

phantasmagorical creatures are friezes

on mossy boulders. 

We share bowls of bone broth, blood and song,

lip to lip, ear to ear, heart to heart. 

The frost circles and jousts, goes without a touch. 

We gift light bulb stories and flickering 

rings of emotions, 

make tiaras of 

pussy-willows and fern, 

and flags of colours leached from our vestments, 

by osmosis, in symbiosis, 

fly high in our sky. 

It is a feast of the senses in this forest-- 

sparks light up the sky from our combustions. 

From the outside, the citadel starts to sing. 

Pebbles, then rock, warm to our touch

and the lichen doesn’t shrink when we pet it. 

The thunder abates, makes a rainbow mussed

almost immediately-- 

but it does speckle the sky, 

even though for a fleeting moment.

And when the gates of the citadel finally 

open, 

we invite its inhabitants 

to come outside and play. 

Poet's Notes:  So many desires unfulfilled, so many doors that do not open, so many tiny daily victories--life is a mosaic of failures and successes. But the greatest victory (for me, at least) is to be true to oneself, and in all endeavors, to be kind--to open those parts of the heart that cruelty and defeat have closed and live a full life.

Editor’s Note:  I saw the citadel as something literal at first, particularly until the turn at "but" midway through the piece.  Then I began to see the citadel as a poetic conceit for the walls we build around ourselves.  Until we understand ourselves and open up ourselves to the world by achieving a certain modicum of self-actualization, we cannot release our creative spirits or "inhabitants".