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This Could Be Enough

Mojitos, stories, sisterhood's warmth holds longing. Tonight's chaotic city, a fleeting, vivid memory, proves enough.

July 15, 2018

We are warm with Mojitos
and your stories of Poland

and your verities about men
who fear intimacy.

This sisterhood could almost be enough
and still it isn’t, we know.

And those men —
the ones who fear intimacy

               and the ones that don’t —
they won’t be enough either.

But this evening
of muddled longing and rage,

me in my red skirt,
you in your summer dress,

the man at the far table
glowering in lust,

the ditsy waiter
(his gaze greened by a fleeting memory
of rains in Mangalore),

the embrace
of this gently hysterical city,

and the hours deemed happy
by the gods
of Tuesday night,

is all we really need to remember.

Ten years later,
               and maybe sooner,
we won’t ask for more.

📖
PART OF A COLLECTION

The Lover and 2 other poems

View Full Collection →

Arundhati Subramaniam

Arundhathi Subramaniam is the author of four books of poems, most recently When God Is a Traveller (Bloodaxe Books, 2014) and Where I Live: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2009). Her prose works include the bestselling biography of a contemporary mystic Sadhguru: More Than a Life, Penguin and Book of Buddha, Penguin Books (reprinted several times). As editor, she has worked on a Penguin anthology of essays on sacred journeys in the country (Pilgrim’s India), and a Sahitya Akademi anthology of Post-Independence Indian Poetry in English (Another Country). She has co-edited a Penguin anthology of contemporary Indian love poems in English (Confronting Love).

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