A Collection of Poems by Roshni Kainikkara: On Pain, Void, Silence, Solace, and Gaza!

These poems do not arrive to perform. They arrive quietly, like breath after a long pause, like a thought you did not know you were holding. Written from a place where emotion often outruns language, they sit in the fragile space between feeling and form. This is poetry as inward labour: attentive, unhurried, and deeply honest. Each piece listens before it speaks, allowing silence, grief, longing, and love to find their own shape. What emerges is not declaration but recognition. These poems by Roshni Kainikkara ask the reader to slow down, to enter gently, and to encounter the self, the other, and the world not through spectacle, but through stillness, vulnerability, and truth.

Roshni says that for her “poetry is an inward reflection – a slow unraveling of the self, a letter written to myself, and, at times, to others. There are moments when emotion eclipses language. Over time, I have learned to sift my thoughts gently, binding them to honest perceptions.”

With this collection of poems, The AIDEM ventures into the artistic and creative realm, bringing forth the voices of people, to listen, to ponder, to think, and to question!

Pain 

What do we call
a pain without words,
without tears –
without a voice,
without release –
a dense, unrelenting grief
pressed close –
far too close –
to the tender, trembling
centre of the heart?

How does one unbind
a sorrow like this?
Will it ever loosen –
slowly, scarcely seen –
bleeding itself away
into the unhurried silence
of time?

Or will it remain –
anchored deep in the marrow –
a sealed, dim chamber within,
its shadow shifting now and then,
yet never departing –
never easing away –
a stark, steady anguish
beating beneath
the thin, breakable breath
we call living?

What do we call such a pain? 

(This poem arose from the shock of an unforeseen loss –
of a presence deeply close to me)

Dear Life 

Pitch-black silence.
Dark clouds envelop.
Waves rise, collide,
then slowly recede –
the aching rhythm of existence.

You left me adrift in my darkest hours,
turned away when I reached for solace;
and at times,
left me unseen,
unheard… untouched.

Yet, dear Life –
with all your chaos and chasms,
your wounds and weariness –
I love you fiercely,
without knowing why.

Huzn

Rain fades,
green blooms;
her gaze –
a shard of colourless dreams.

Deepest emotions,
rawest feelings –
no words,
no language;
just a void
piercing the silence.

Huzn –
a gnawing ache!

Huzn: Urdu word
deep sorrow, grief. 

(In one such chronicle of the Wayanad Chooralmala disaster, it was the desolate, hopeless eyes of an eighteen-year-old girl that moved me to pen these words.)

A Lullaby for Gaza

My dear little angels…
do you know –
your names are recalled 
and remembered
a thousand thousand miles away?

That even the thought of you
rises like a lump in the human throat –
a sigh swollen
with agony and anguish 
too deep for tears;
a pain that pierces
the innermost sanctuaries of the heart?

How –
how do mothers in Gaza
exist, endure?

How do they breathe
through the ruins of lullabies,
through rooms once alive
with life, and love,
and laughter –
with the very pulse of tiny footsteps?

Their children –
their mischief,
their marvel,
their moments,
their memories –
no longer answer.

How can they now cook
the favourite meal
for a child who will never return?

How can they now sleep,
when even dreams
bleed with nothing but wounds, 
and worries,
and weariness that never ends?

How do they live,
when every breath
is thick and thorny
with void,
with vacuum,
with loss,
with lacking…

And words –
frail, fragile –
kneel before that truth,
knowing
they will never be enough!

Yet never did

Between
love and like,
silence and solace,
the seen and the unseen,
the told and the untold -
a thin veil:
so dreamy,
so delicate,
softly doting.

She longed to ask,
yet never did.
He wished to tell,
yet never did.

For love has a way
of crossing
even the softest borders.