Rajat Jayanti
The dead branch inscribes wild
to-do lists on the wind. How many moons
since we first woke up, lip against lip
knowing our kitchen sink
of years has dripped away: papers, continents,
coffee stains, the drawers jammed open
in astonishment? You put your mouth to me
when I sliced my hand to keep me from losing
even a drop of our life. As for the rest:
blackbird shouting in the black walnut tree,
afternoon sun cutting the ground into roses,
night banging on and on at the gate.
For a few years now how we’ve tried to accept
we won’t ever be back to this particular quarrel
of sheets, to this exact plastic milk-jug morning,
opening our eyes together, again, yes
once more, again, how ferocious that shock
of light carving its own vows on each other’s skin.
Copyright © 2025 by Kirun Kapur. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 31, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“The title Rajat Jayanti means something like “Silver Jubilee” in Hindi—a celebration marking a twenty-five-year anniversary. This poem came together in fits and starts. Small clusters of lines kept popping up over several months, their connection to each other unclear until I was deep into the revision process. The poem mulls over the contradictions of a long marriage—the way it is full of absurdity and grandeur, predictability and constant surprise, mundane efforts and romantic gestures, which may all turn out to be the same thing in the end—different annunciations of love in the face of time.”
—Kirun Kapur
Kirun Kapur
Kirun Kapur is a poet, editor, and translator. She is the author of Women in the Waiting Room (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist (Elixir Press, 2015), which won the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize for Poetry and the Antivenom Poetry Award.
Kapur teaches at Amherst College, where she is the director of the creative writing program.