Gayatri Rajan
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Gayatri Rajan (she/her) is a writer and high school sophomore from Andover, MA. Her work has been recognized by Eunoia Review, Creative Minds Imagine Magazine, Best in Teen Writing, Write the World, and the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, among others. In her spare time, she loves listening to electro-pop, hanging out with her sister, and drinking far too much tea.
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(CW: Suicide)
We Were Birds
After "Torso of Air" and "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" by Ocean Vuong
That night he wore a white shirt and leapt
into the river. Didn’t surface for air. More water
than body, more tide than blood.
We’d just turned thirteen. After,
I closed every window. The mouths of tulips
broken. Beneath every oak, a lost limb.
I folded hundreds of pigeons, mangled paper into a beak
and a body. This poem is for how his voice cleaved the air
into feathers, how I took a knife to the wall after,
until a moon of light shone through the apartment,
until my knuckles bled like his.
Suppose I woke and saw only lightning.
Suppose the birds burned their songs
that summer. Suppose I speared sharks
in the river. I screamed Peter
which meant pray which meant please. How a name can sound
like a clock. A grave in a field full of ticking. Week-old
feathers. This boy, this bird-- too human
for this earth. Which is to say: sometimes, I don’t exist
except in the universe where everyone stays alive, where wings sprout
from our spines, where we have more to give
than prayer. Which is to say: the morning after,
I gave my bones to the water. Feathers wavering
in the river.
A blackbird in the oaks.
That night he wore a white shirt and leapt
into the river. Didn’t surface for air. More water
than body, more tide than blood.
We’d just turned thirteen. After,
I closed every window. The mouths of tulips
broken. Beneath every oak, a lost limb.
I folded hundreds of pigeons, mangled paper into a beak
and a body. This poem is for how his voice cleaved the air
into feathers, how I took a knife to the wall after,
until a moon of light shone through the apartment,
until my knuckles bled like his.
Suppose I woke and saw only lightning.
Suppose the birds burned their songs
that summer. Suppose I speared sharks
in the river. I screamed Peter
which meant pray which meant please. How a name can sound
like a clock. A grave in a field full of ticking. Week-old
feathers. This boy, this bird-- too human
for this earth. Which is to say: sometimes, I don’t exist
except in the universe where everyone stays alive, where wings sprout
from our spines, where we have more to give
than prayer. Which is to say: the morning after,
I gave my bones to the water. Feathers wavering
in the river.
A blackbird in the oaks.
Commentary
Gayatri on "We Were Birds":
This poem was inspired by a suicide at my old high school. I wanted to write about how the entire community was marked indelibly by the incident, and about the slow process of healing. Birds, to me, mean flight and falter, wing and wound. I wrote the first draft of the poem in a single night, then edited it over about two weeks. I found myself thinking often about how we all thought we were immortal. Too young to know better, we pretended we were birds. This poem is both a love note and an elegy for that mindset.
I was also inspired by how we tell stories about death. In obituaries and news articles, we can become numb to death. Yet poetry, and its grounding in nature, can allow us to feel and process loss like no other expression. To hold emotion as powerfully as we can.
I hoped to convey the split between ‘before’ and ‘after’ in the visual structure of the poem. The incident is not named— it is only alluded to— and every “after” is lost in whitespace. To convey the possibility of healing, I brought in that final blackbird: though our immortality was dead, our hope didn’t have to be.
EIC Christine Taylor on "We Were Birds":
The beauty in Gayatri’s poem lies in her ability to deal with an incredibly painful situation using the imagery of the natural world. Once I read, “This poem is for how his voice cleaved the air / into feathers,” I got a welcomed chill. As a reader, I wanted to know the experience of the speaker who tragically lost her friend, and I felt I was in safe hands going on this journey with the speaker. And by the end of the poem, there is the sense that the speaker and the community are grieving in healthy ways and that their futures will be brighter.
This poem was inspired by a suicide at my old high school. I wanted to write about how the entire community was marked indelibly by the incident, and about the slow process of healing. Birds, to me, mean flight and falter, wing and wound. I wrote the first draft of the poem in a single night, then edited it over about two weeks. I found myself thinking often about how we all thought we were immortal. Too young to know better, we pretended we were birds. This poem is both a love note and an elegy for that mindset.
I was also inspired by how we tell stories about death. In obituaries and news articles, we can become numb to death. Yet poetry, and its grounding in nature, can allow us to feel and process loss like no other expression. To hold emotion as powerfully as we can.
I hoped to convey the split between ‘before’ and ‘after’ in the visual structure of the poem. The incident is not named— it is only alluded to— and every “after” is lost in whitespace. To convey the possibility of healing, I brought in that final blackbird: though our immortality was dead, our hope didn’t have to be.
EIC Christine Taylor on "We Were Birds":
The beauty in Gayatri’s poem lies in her ability to deal with an incredibly painful situation using the imagery of the natural world. Once I read, “This poem is for how his voice cleaved the air / into feathers,” I got a welcomed chill. As a reader, I wanted to know the experience of the speaker who tragically lost her friend, and I felt I was in safe hands going on this journey with the speaker. And by the end of the poem, there is the sense that the speaker and the community are grieving in healthy ways and that their futures will be brighter.
