More poetry for poetry month!

Storytelling
by Sampurna Chattarji

Cupped around the flame tree, listening.

A conch pursed hard against your
mother-of-pearl lips calling to arms
the long-lost notes of remembering.

A turned-up lamp smoking soot
against clear glass your soot-black eyes
greedy and intent as mine.

A mat on a cool floor the slide
of rattan striping your thigh into patterns
the color of flesh.

A cloth sheet strung tight
against the dark whispering with moths
come to taste the flicker of light.

Many pacts, unwritten.
Told, in many tongues.

Why not storytelling?
Why not the urgent hush,
the sacred whorls,
the spool of silence, ravelling?

I have been granted the elephant's memory.

I will count and recount the ways
in which a poem turns slowly
into the story I wasn't writing,
was always writing,
into the sharp clear sound of morning,
ancestral and strong.