Completion Poem by Salil Chaturvedi

Wooden drawers
don't yield up their secrets
easily. Especially after monsoons.

Some of them make it clear
that damp rearrangements
that go on in the moist darkness

take up till winter to finish.
Eventually when I get this drawer open
I find a dark-grey, fungus-ridden

spectacle case
holding old spectacles
with rusted and bent handles, a round, corrugated seed

a small, sharp porcupine quill
a used stamp, depicting two greater adjutant storks
and a brief shred of paper

with words not in my handwriting—
"It's all openness It's all gift.
Run up to the Chorla Ghats to a Shouting Point

and scream out from the edge of a precipice:
Each mountain is god!
Each valley is goddess! "