HCE received a lot of high-quality submissions for The Green Issue – sadly, too many to fit inside the magazine! So we offered some writers and artists who’d sent in work the chance to be published here on the website. Keep an eye on our social media for more great work like this, now that The Green Issue print magazine has been released! (For more information or to purchase your copy, visit our shop.)
Priyanka Sacheti
The Garden a Storm Sees in a Desert
Every desert is a garden
but it takes a storm
to hew possibles from
the stony impossible.
In footsteps of departed rain,
awake long-slumbering seeds
insistent on fulfilling
their paused destinies.
We call it hope:
they call it life.
Look: these lilac flowers,
erupting from tight-fisted rocks,
sunshine smashing cloud walls
to bestow hope upon the hopeless.
Look: this tiny orange-white butterfly
fighting a hurricane of a breeze
to nestle inside mauve-rivered petals,
for it knows not when
it will swim in them again.
Beneath a bare blue sky,
I wade through a ghost wadi,
hearing the phantom water
whispering through shrub pools.
The half-moon meanwhile reposes
in stanzas between the acacia branches,
lovingly gazing at the miniature gardens
hanging from them.
I think sometimes
if only I could send you
that specific glare
of that desert green.
Sundrops falling on snow
could not be more fierce.
I have to shield my eyes
but the glare is still there
at the end of the day,
an unbottled sea
pounding the shore until
land and water become one.
Priyanka Sacheti is a writer and poet based in Bangalore, India. Raised in Oman, she was educated at Universities of Warwick and Oxford, United Kingdom. She has been published in numerous publications with a special focus on art, gender, diaspora, and identity. Her literary work has appeared in The Barren, Berfrois, The Lunchticket, and Jaggery Lit as well as various other literary journals and anthologies. She’s currently working on a poetry collection. She explores the intersection of her writing and photography at Instagram (@anatlasofallthatisee) and she tweets @priyankasacheti1.