Promise

    by Aswin Vijayan

    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.

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