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
The Teapot
I spot the rustic teapot in a shop in the
forgotten by-lanes deserted in a corner.
Its unrefined beauty attracts me.
With reverence, I pick it up
and place it on the counter.
The shopkeeper lifts his eyes and looks at me.
'Finally, its turn has come, but it is of no use.
It doesn't have a handle, and the spout cracked.'
'I noticed. We have known each other for centuries.'
I place the teapot on the table in my room,
untouched. Devoid of hope, its spirit languishes.
One spring morning, I lifted its lid.
An origami bird lay trapped in its belly.
I take her out of the cracked solitariness.
The bird skies wings of poetic closure
and flies into the wild blue yonder.
The Teapot was recited at the Poetry Festival Singapore, Catharsis 2023: thank you, Low Kian Seh.