Wildling

One day, after an early morning walk by the river, I came back home with this photograph, and the unexpected urge to write a poem. I did write the poem, and today, it was published by Strands Publishers, making my grey and wet Sunday feel all bright and sunny. It's incidentally my first publication in India, which makes it even more special.

The poem is called 'Wildling', and it's there below the two feisty swans, and online at http://strandspublishers.weebly.com/lit-sphere/wildling

I hope you enjoy it, this piece of my river.

Wildling

Morning has broken
                 
open, bleeding into the river.

The streetlamps are still on.

Two swans float up in unhurried hunger

for bread I do not have.

Twenty-two huddle farther up the river

asleep, their necks wrung

into their wings. A lull

of white feathers on which water does not stick.

Their river is always dry.

It is land.



My river runs by me

reflecting runners, dreams and detritus.

A life of moorings and unmoorings,

a mirror of semi-truths -

where the light of a dog-pissed streetlamp

looks like flecks of real gold.

I stand still, very still. Watching

my body ripple and quiver like a wildling.

A swan passes by and I shatter into pixels.

But I can wait, I have nowhere I need to be.

The waters will calm, I will patch together again.

...

(Please feel free to share the link on social media, or just with the person sitting next to you - Strands is a wonderful independent publisher, and really deserves the support.)

Eight

To Chotto-ma:

You turned eight today. So I'm sitting here trying to draw you a phoenix because I know it'll make you squeal with joy.

As you grow older, I find myself less willing to write about you. Not about the books you love and the rocks you collect, but about the person you are. Your thoughts, your heart, the way you look at the world - the things that really matter, the things that make you the very unique eight-year-old you are. So if you're reading the blog some day, when you're as old as me, and see the silences here, know that I'm keeping you to myself. I'm keeping you to yourself.

When we decide to leave our phones and cameras at home for the day, and then suddenly find ourselves living a moment - like you picking wildflowers in the sunset - and I wish I could take a photograph, you remind me of what I'd once told you, "Ma, we can take a photo with our memory."

So that's what we're doing, Ba and I. We're taking photos in the privacy of our memories. And telling you, every day, with words and squishes and the occasional phoenix, how much we love you.

You make us believe in magic.