My family was a family
full of aspiring poets.
I, a poet,
killed a mosquito as it landed on a classic book,
a great literary masterpiece
My hand and the page clapped together
to silence the flying insect
The stain stuck on the precious letters
like a red signature of the gruesome death.
My brother, a poet, saw the blood stain
and said, “Lord Mosquito sacrificed
at the sacred altar of Great Literature.”
My father, a poet, saw the blood stamp
and lectured in verses,
“That dead thing represents the downtrodden,
whose fate is to die
If they dared to touch or read,
making the very book the graveyard.”
But my mother, not really a poet,
who was in a separate room,
on a separate mat,
eating on a separate plate,
cleaning impure clothes,
shouted,
“Maybe the mosquito died of excess menstruation.”
Sri Rohith Rajam hails from Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh and is now working as a Creative Content Writer at Unvoiced Media and Entertainment. He has completed his Masters in Communication from the University of Hyderabad, specialising in Print and New Media. His research interests are in the field of transmedia storytelling, merging the narrative methods of folktales with the modern digital media. His stories have appeared in Kitaab and Inkspire.