Poem
The Almirah Goes to Scrap
The closing movement of a verse novel, published here as a standalone poem.
Sixty years of hinges, and the last owner
does not even know the first one's name.
The scrap dealer weighs it like any other metal —
which, by now, honestly, it mostly is.
Nobody photographs a scrapyard.
Nobody writes an elegy for a hinge.
And yet I have followed this door for sixty pages
and I find I cannot simply let it close.
Here, then, is the last entry in its ledger:
sold for parts, on a Tuesday, without ceremony,
having kept, faithfully, for six decades,
everything it was ever asked to hold.
Note: The full verse novel, The Weight of Empty Almirahs, follows the same object across sixty years.
More from Poetry
- Inventory of a Locked Room — Ila Bhaduri
- The Driver Remembers Differently — Aakash Dev Sharma
- Fourth Floor, No Lift — Priyanka Oberoi