Poetry: Mayura Tiwari

Thoughts on Time

 

That’s time – always on the move

That’s the border – loathe to budge an inch

And that’s the wind – regardless of the fence.

No passport. No ticket. Smuggling stories

And the sweet drops of rain.

 

 

In the middle of the ocean

Afloat on the equator

Along the middle of the earth

Arms flung outwards

On the dateline.

North-South.

East-West.

Yesterday - Today.

Summer – Winter.

Last year – This year.

A millennium apart.

This moment in time.

 

 

                  The wind just smiled and blew along.

                  The clouds drifted like every other day.

                  The gulls, they called their usual cries.

                  While I was busy

                  Marking borders. Marking time.

 

 

 

 

Putting Together the Broken Pieces of an Imperfect World

 

No, it wasn’t a crash

Just a quiet affair

But the pieces fell apart all right.

Unobtrusive. Silent.

The beginning was lost

In the middle of nowhere.

 

Now the silence is deafening.

Words reduced to ashes

Swirling in a misty haze

Where eyes once locked in knowing;

Vast confines of spaces

In narrow alleyways of time.

 

Give me the broken pieces

One by one

I might still make sense

Of the familiar jagged edges.

There must be a song somewhere

In this medley of thorns.

                       

                        Perhaps a bud or two

                        That had just forgotten to bloom.

 

Thinking About Morpurgo’s War Horse

 

Shy, quiet creature that I am

Foreigner in a foreign land

Amid mines and flares and trenches

No fields, no streams, just sodden sand.

 

The little boy who rubbed me dry

My first night in the stable stall

I dream of him each aching night

Tired, lonely, hungry and cold.

 

The gunshots never, never cease

Nor the cries, nor the wails, nor the moans

Of the lads who were sold

Sweet dreams of glory; valour they must own.

 

Pastures turned to wasteland

Rivulets into bloody flows

What good the dreams you sold those boys

Broken, bereft, now comatose?

 

We cringe together, my soldier and I

Each time the canon roars

I start and shy and he sits still

But trembling in his soul.

 

I’m a war horse in a strange land

My home is far away

Lined with gorse and hay and heather

On a farm by the bay.

***

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Setu, May 2023