Ashok Vajpeyi

The rasa that arrives after the others have spoken. Not emptiness but settlement, the water clear because it has stopped being stirred, wanting nothing further from the hour.

15 compositions

The rasa of nearness and its long shadow. Not only the meeting, also the waiting that precedes it, the doorway watched all evening, the way a room rearranges itself around one absent person.

12 compositions

The rasa of grief kept in good order. Not wailing, the quieter labour after: setting the cup back on its shelf, folding what will not be worn again, learning the exact weight of a name.

7 compositions

The rasa of the step taken anyway. Courage in this key is unglamorous and precise: the vow spoken before the odds are counted, the standing that costs something and is done quietly.

3 compositions

The rasa of the refusal that will not soften. Fury here has grammar and aim, the wound that learned to speak, the injustice that declines to be reasonable about itself.

2 compositions

The rasa of the widened eye. Scale undoes us gently here: the world proves larger than the sentence built for it, and the poem's finest achievement is to stay astonished.

2 compositions

The rasa of the held breath. Terror is mostly anticipation, the corridor before the corridor, the sound that has not repeated yet, the mind furnishing the dark with its own inventory.

2 compositions

The rasa of the flinch that teaches. Revulsion is the body's honesty about rot, bodily, social, moral, and the poet refuses the mercy of looking away.

1 composition