Promise

Even hell is uncertain when I walk with you.
Sand under our feet and fishing boats spill
from the seams of the horizon. I want to take you
to Sottoripa or Weymouth where waves roll pebbles
in their mouths and the masts of ships stick out
piercing the sky.
And I promise you:
when solitude comes for each of us
and we grapple with the names of gods
what remains will be vaster than the still sea.
**

Aswin Vijayan is an Assistant Professor at the Zamorin’s Guruvayurappan College, Calicut and has an MA in Poetry from the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University Belfast. His poems have been published in The Bombay Literary Magazine, Verse of Silence, The Tangerine, and Coldnoon among others. He curates a “New in Poetry” section for Nether Quarterly and is the Managing Editor at The Quarantine Train.