Anand Atre is an alum of the MLA Program at Johns Hopkins University.
poetry
The Cosmopolitan’s Lament
Anand Atre, Johns Hopkins University
The Romance larghetto swells no longer for a beloved’s face,
A single heart’s refusal,
But for the country I cannot name,
The table where no chair is mine.
Chopin knew this: how melody can ache with the weight of all you carry,
Your humanity, so carefully tended,
Blooming in a room where no one enters.
I am fluent in four languages of loneliness,
I am a citizen of airports, of almost-belonging,
My roots have grown flimsy in the shallow pot,
I carry from city to city, from year to year.
The piano speaks what I cannot:
I am here, I am depth, I am worth receiving,
But the notes dissolve in empty air,
Beautiful and unwitnessed.
There are moments, listen, where the music settles into something like acceptance,
Not peace, not the end of wanting,
But the quiet choice to be my own vessel,
To carry this ache with dignity,
To hold my own complexity like a secret no one asked to hear.
Chopin understood:
Deracinated, exiled, playing for the void.
He makes a companion of me,
Together we know that sorrow can wear the face of beauty,
That yearning can be exquisite, even, especially, when it has nowhere to arrive.
The concerto does not resolve,
It simply continues, transfigured,
The romantic becomes the universal:
One human voice in an indifferent world,
Still singing, still insisting that this depth, this tenderness,
This terrible beauty matters,
Even if only to the one who holds it.