“A Body Made Of Graves” Poem by Aarisha Sen
“A Body Made Of Graves” poem by Aarisha Sen is a profound exploration of mortality, flesh, and human consciousness. Through poignant imagery, Sen captures the quiet conflict between eternal soul and perishable body, offering a deeply moving existential reflection.
“A Body Made Of Graves”
What cruel god, if any,
mistook a cage for a cradle
and called the imprisonment birth?
I was given a body
before I was given a name,
a mouth before a language,
and blood—
that ancient, red insistence
that I must remain.
Oh, how the heart humiliates me,
beating its small, obedient prayers
against the walls of my chest,
as though survival were a sacrament,
as though I had ever knelt
before the altar of being.
I have never understood
this animal devotion to existence,
this frantic worship of the morning,
this body dragging me toward another dawn
when all I have ever wanted
was to know what lies beyond it.
For there is something in me
that remembers no beginning,
something that looks upon the stars
with the grief of an exile
who cannot recall the homeland
from which they were banished.
I think I was made for elsewhere.
Somewhere without the tyranny of hours,
where nothing beautiful must perish
to prove that it was beautiful,
where eternity is not a promise
but a country one can enter
without leaving anything behind.
Instead, I was given skin.
This terrible, tender border
between myself and the world.
This thin and trembling veil
through which the universe
is permitted to touch me.
And God, how it touches me.
In the gold of late afternoon,
in the rain grieving against the windows,
in the unbearable sweetness of a voice
I know I will not hear forever.
Perhaps this is the cruelest joke of flesh:
to make a sanctuary of the temporary,
to teach the soul to love
what time has already begun to take.
I resent the blood
for remembering what I never promised,
the lungs for their faith in tomorrow,
the bones for building their little cathedral
around a silence
that has never learned to pray.
What am I,
if not an eternity
forced to wear the face of an hour?
A consciousness with nowhere to go
but inward.
A godless prayer
kneeling inside an animal.
A vast and nameless thing
made to beg the night for sleep,
made to count its sorrows in heartbeats,
made to watch the mirror
and call this temporary arrangement
I.
And yet—
there are nights
when the moon spills silver
across the floor,
and my hands look almost holy
in the borrowed light.
Nights when the wind
moves softly through the curtains
and the world, for one unguarded moment,
forgets to be cruel.
Then I wonder
if the body is not a punishment
but a wound the infinite has suffered
in order to feel.
If flesh is merely eternity
learning how to be touched.
If these mortal bones
are not the bars of a prison
but the branches of some ancient tree,
and I, so desperate to escape,
have mistaken my own roots
for chains.
Still, I mourn the things
I have never known.
The lives I might have lived
in other bodies, other centuries,
beneath other constellations.
The words I will never speak,
the hands I will never hold,
the countless worlds
that will go on existing
without ever having known my name.
How obscene,
to be born with an appetite for forever
and a body that cannot keep
a single season.
How beautiful,
to hunger for what cannot be held.
Perhaps the soul is not tired of living.
Perhaps it is tired of being small.
Perhaps it has mistaken the longing
to understand the universe
for the longing to escape it.
And perhaps, somewhere beyond
the reach of blood and bone,
there is no heaven waiting—
only a silence vast enough
to contain every question
I was too mortal to answer.
Until then,
I will remain here,
in this cathedral of perishable things,
listening to the heart
perform its ridiculous little miracle.
Beat.
Beat.
Beat.
As though it knows something
I do not.
As though, beneath all this flesh,
beneath all this grief,
beneath the centuries of silence
I have mistaken for a curse—
some ancient part of me
is still astonished
to be here.
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