Category: Poetry

I peek through buffalo-laced curtains
Lacing milk into my tea by the kitchen sink
Hoping to catch a sinking glimpse of Julien
Returning home from a milk run

He’d tip his newsboy cap
In courtesy and contemplation
Greeting by-standers by the paper stand
Crossing columns filled with cryptic clues

And when little milk-toothed kids
Were chased by piercing canines
He’d shield them with his houndstooth coat—
Part of his daily grind

A regular at the club
In his classic argyle style
Trading light banter with his mates
With moves of a grandmaster

I still sit by the sill
Hoping to catch his frame
In a single windowpane—
Clouded by the steam of my tea

~Poem 39

Author’s Note: Read the first part in this series here.

The October wind rewinds
To when we sat divided by a wicker basket
Both of us catching the drift of the grasslands—
Your legs wavering, mine rooted in anticipation

A loose strand stuck to the corner of my lip
I would imagine it looked poetic, foolishly enough
For your mother called the scene careless
And you couldn’t agree more, letting us fray

I thought we could watch the clouds
Call one a clover, another a doodle by a lover
With tricks up your sleeve, devotion trailing my hem
I remained struck till one rained on me

The skin beneath the slit in my skirt
Was once thrilled by your ice cold touch
Oddly, that day, I squeezed my thighs shut—
They chafed on the way home

All I wanted was your fingers to dance
Along the folds of my accordion pleats
But only a pool of tears whirled in my lap
And when I finally rose, my skirt billowed free

~Poem 36

Julien was no archetypal character
Not one to make you flick through pages
While the midnight oil flickered
Yet he remained archaic as a gentleman

Striding through hushed alleyways
In brogues laced with cherry blossom
Glancing past side-view mirrors
He was fine, much like his fine-toothed comb

Clad in a stiff white collar
And lingering notes of old spice
Suspended in pleated trousers
With washed out blotches of ink

A hand-me-down handkerchief
A briefcase laden with letters among ledgers
A tiffin carrier clinking by his knee
And all the weight of being the breadwinner

His dial swept from nine to five
But barely slept when the clock countered
His rimless glasses were lost in the riddle—
Once bygone, who would care to be woebegone?

~Poem 35

Author’s Note: This is an attempt at writing a parallel to William Wordsworth’s Lucy poems and is a dedication to all the men I have had the privilege of knowing. You can find the next part in this series here.

Silver shoes can take you anywhere
Maybe even home
But silver is just a shiny grey
And the quest for emerald can leave you jaded

The yellow brick road
Only leads up to a garden path
And the gold shower flowers
Swirl up to be ruins of a safe haven

In a stale pinafore
I have never felt more stripped
In a secure mock-neck
I have never felt more strangled

The wicked witch came with her weight
But remained the keeper of the royal tank
The cowardly lion came with all his might
But became a seeker of the storm’s eye

Oh Dorothy! Didn’t anyone tell you?
You can waddle all your way home
And harbour all the wishful thinking
But these moccasins will wear out one day

~Poem 33

Author’s Note: The imagery in this poem is based on Wizard of Oz, a famous classic written by L. Frank Baum. Here “Royal Tank” denotes a neighbourhood in Delhi, i.e. Hauz Khas, a place that felt like home to me at one point. As opposed to the visual adaptation, the shoes that Dorothy wears in the books are actually silver. The color of the shoes was changed to red to take advantage of the new Technicolor film process used in big-budget Hollywood films of the era.