“This poem was a difficult poem to write. It is part of a new collection I’m writing titled Onement Won, poems inspired by the exploration of grieving, rejoice, and renewal through an examination of Barnett Newman’s Onement series, popular culture, and the Upanishads. This particular poem came directly out of a therapy session I had with a new therapist who had a lot to say to me about my past and how she viewed it. It was illuminating. In the first session I was attempting to explain my past fifteen plus years to the present in fifteen minutes, which included my late husband’s death, my now-estranged relationship to his daughter, my disappointment/hurt with this, and my desire to understand how to adjust to my new life with the past still haunting me. As I was writing this poem, I was reading both the Upanishads and Lauren Berlant and was trying to think about how I could have this poem be honest about my complaints, my confessions, and my truths in terms that could encapsulate an instruction to myself, with a kind of aphorism I could live by, framed almost as a kind of fairy tale of woe and truth.”
—Prageeta Sharma