Bio
Alka Balain presently resides in Singapore. She is an autoimmune warrior and loves to swim. Her writings have appeared/are forthcoming in Poetry India, The Hooghly Review, Visual Verse, Usawa Literary Review, Kitaab, DREICH, JAACL, Amethyst Review, and elsewhere. She has shared her poems on several platforms; Poetry Festival Singapore (PFS), DLF Gurugram Poetry Festival, St Stephen's Lit Fest, Spoke and Bird etc. Alka organises literary events for the Asian Literary Society.
Alka Balain
Enormous Smallness
The sunset wears pine trees tippet.
It steals the ebbs of mountains,
variegated colours of foliage and
anoints the sky turmeric.
I sit on the stairs of Bhumiya temple,
poised on the colours of denouement.
The knoll of bells breaks the circle stillness
as the resolute mountains swallow the sun.
At night, I find the sun sleeping on my pillow.
I thought it had set: how it walked the return
trail beyond my ken. It keeps me awake.
I snuggle into the lazy daisy nature it lends.
At dawn, the glory is back in the sky, and
the mountains emerge in the warmth
of His yellow hands.
Bhumiya : a temple in Satkhol, Uttarakhand, India
Title is inspired by Enormous Smallness, a nonfiction picture book about the
poet E.E. Cummings by Matthew Burgess