On the delicious mornings of 2008, I tuck my white kurta under my knees and sink onto the crumbly dirt gathering on the balcony. My eyes, half drowsy, are fixed on the fruit tree under our apartment. Sometimes I look out the wall-high window and see the grinning grass take a small peak at the sun and think: “This shyness of love doesn't belong to summers.”
But when nature fixes it's love on itself there's never too much we humans have to say.
(Aren’t we all but of this same earth too).
we continue to and braid motia,
the child in my eight-year old self still giggles.
oh, and then the years pass
and this arm of summer wraps
around me. there’s a lofty smile
she plays with when the heavy
smell of mud rises in the air
like the lights of a nearby streetlight.
am i moving apart from the trees
or are they getting estranged from me.
a loud wind comes in knocking on our bodies
like it knows us but we never recognize it,
it's not the wet air or the monsoon air or
the air that smells like ripened fruits picked
and set neatly in baskets.
and it’s as if i am eating a plate of food
right out of the oven. but it's never pleasant
just hot summer air making rounds of the streets.
arms of rain rapidly stomach the soil, eating it
before the sun-dried winds return to this land.
every newspaper heads with the line
"this exclusive summer, the temperature tastes one degree higher
but we keep walking on the burning grass that smiles shy no longer"
the summers are turning inclusive,
fearsomely holding each other closer
than the year of befores.
it's the summer of 2020 and my
blue-green-child-self returns inside
of my graying body with a strange knock.
she asks a question too soon for her:
why does the feral song of the trees
not sing tender to me? why does the ferocity
of the sparkled river-water and
lake-water not swim a hope into each day?
why did my moon-bird heart
wane too soon and rise too early?
in this loneliness she cried:
you are one and the world
is one but we all in our aloneness
feel like every hand connecting
us to each other has been towel-dried
and cleaned to the ends of every finger
no mud, no earth, no rain.
an endless impossibility of connection
screams out inside a bowl it makes of itself.
at the end of the day, a morning calling in late,
i look for the briefest moment at the white
shirts hanging on balconies, aside the bright
redness of tomatoes, swaying in the bluing sky.
even when it doesn't dare bring
the blue-green child-self back to me.
