“Coaxing the Darkness Out of Your Eyes” © Bill Wolak

 

Fate or faith?

The childhood innocence when our eyes met.
Love, infatuation, crush, I did not know the difference.
A warm feeling, blissful.

When I opened up to you, it was a young teenager expressing herself,
You misunderstood, your innocence and boyhood;
Time passed, days slid into decades.
No, I did not forget but we had no time for making memories.

Is it fate or faith? I do not know nor am I questioning.
Some greater energy, that we met after a lifetime.
Felt like it was yesterday that two teenagers had exchanged wordless feelings.

Could feel the warmth when you held my hands,
Silent exchanges under the scintillating sun.
Haven’t felt so light, like a feather moving with the wind.
Got completely swept, we both.

The intense connect left me speechless.
Meeting after decades felt like fresh breath.
And now, two bodies miles apart, yet souls so close, intertwined forever.
Some feelings are best left unspoken.
Still they go deep- very deep.

 

Papia Sengupta teaches at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She works on the intersectionality between AI, work, gender, language and education, urban living in Global South. She held fellowships at Brown University, Queens Canada, Rhodes and the University of Edinburgh. Her poems have found home in the Borderless and RIC Journal. She authored two books: Language as Identity in Colonial India and Critical Sites of Inclusion in India’s Higher Education. Her papers have been published in various international journals. She was interviewed by The Guardian for her work on language and multilingualism in December 2022. In 2023, she was awarded the British Academy Visiting fellowship.

Bill Wolak is a poet, collage artist, and photographer who has just published his eighteenth book of poetry entitled All the Wind’s Unfinished Kisses with Ekstasis Editions. His collages and photographs have appeared recently in the 2025 Dirty Show in Detroit, Amorous Art 2025 in Indianapolis, the 2025 Rochester Erotic Arts Festival, the 2020 International Festival of Erotic Arts (Chile), the 2020 Seattle Erotic Art Festival, the 2018 Montreal Erotic Art Festival, and Naked in New Hope 2018. He was a featured artist in the book Best of Erotic Art (London, 2022).