Written piece
The Unfinished Thread
Sandeep Kumar Mishra
India
About this piece
The poem is about creation, identity, and impermanence, the poem follows a wandering thread that binds worlds, memories, and selves together.
The Unfinished Thread
In the beginning there was no sky, only a needle
piercing silence into a trembling fabric of almost-being.
A thread fell, thin as breath,
from the fingers of a forgotten goddess of crossings.
She stitched oceans like wounds that refused to close,
salt becoming memory, memory becoming tide.
Each continent a torn sleeve of a giant ancestor,
still whispering through its seams.
I found a thread lodged in my throat;
it spoke in languages I had never learned,
and it said: you are not whole, only woven.
So I followed it
through marketplaces of bone,
through libraries where books bleed dust.
The thread changed colour with every grief—
indigo for exile, saffron for hunger, ash for return.
Somewhere a dancer threaded fire through her spine,
somewhere a child threaded light through broken glass.
I stitched their echoes into my shadow,
but the cloth resisted completion;
it frayed whenever I named it “home.”
Gods came wearing thimbles of thunder,
warning that a finished quilt is a dead one.
So I unstitched my own reflection,
let it scatter like migratory constellations.
Now I carry only the needle
and a thread that refuses obedience—
it sews me into strangers, unravels me from certainty,
and leaves the world beautifully unfinished.