Moonshine

The captain knelt in front of the altar and raised his palms in surrender, for after two hundred fifty days of voyage, exhausting their store of canned food and no respite in sight, sea sickness consumed him and his men like conflagrating wild fire.  

‘Sire, land ahoy!,’ cried the men, banging their fists against the teak door of his room.

The captain opened his eyes to see the top of a light house glowing incandescent against the dark sky, its light as soothing as liquid moonshine.

~Written in response to Sonya's Three Line Tales Prompt at https://only100words.xyz/2021/01/21/three-line-tales-260/ - Three Line Tales 260

Resilience

Manya sat in the midst of papers, swirling in a sea of indigo files. She couldn’t hear the clock ticking but knew that each moment gave way to the next with speed of lightening. The Deadline would creep in, deadly quiet, and stand there, thin-lipped, hands on her hips, demanding her pound of flesh.

Manya stood up and stared out of the window. The red-tiled portico was unpeopled except for the aged gardener who was hunched over, picking tufts of dried grass lining the edge of the green lawn.

How she wished she could join him. Did he want a potted petunia for his garden? Or a gladiolus, may be? She would choose the best ones from her own select array and gift it to the man. Tomorrow. When it would all be over. She would gladly trade the coldness of the ivory tower, where she stood, to the greenness of the grassroots with which the gardener worked. Carefree. Shorn of inane responsibilities. Happy.

But then again, wasn’t happiness a bi-product of the mind, just as suffering was. It was all in the mind. What stood between her and happiness at that moment? It was her mind. Her imagined fear of a missed deadline.

The gardener stood up, stretched his back and made as if to wipe the sweat off his brow. He sat down in a huff, muttering under his breath for a couple of moments, and slowly proceeded to pick up where he had left.  

Manya looked at the clear sky. It was dotted with wispy white clouds. Clouds that predicted good fortune, she knew. The Deadline was inching, slowly and surely. Battling it, tackling it and nailing it, was the Hobson’s choice she would choose.

She turned around and found the indigo blue files staring at her. They were the same colour as the colour of the sky. She picked one and ran her fingers over its smooth surface. She was now holding a piece of the sky, her very own sky.

~Written in response to Rommy's Prompt - Weekly Scribblings #53 : Beautiful Words at Poets and Storytellers United. I chose the word Zuiun: clouds that predict good fortune. Word Count:341

https://poetsandstorytellersunited.blogspot.com/2021/01/weekly-scribblings-53-beautiful-words.html#comment-form

A ball of ideas

Life is all about engagements,

entanglements of

thoughts of action,

actionable thoughts

action and thoughts,

and sometimes thoughtless actions

meaningless thoughts

until the colourful skeins transform into  

one giant, jumble, colourful ball of ideas.

 

It takes a calm mind,

cool and clear

to separate and put them to use

or to see meaning morph from

what is far from a mess.    

~In response to Earthweal Weekly Challenge : Entangled Up in You from Brendan

https://earthweal.com/2021/01/18/earthweal-weekly-challenge-entangled-up-in-you/

Making Sense

It is always easy to unentangle

the Past into clarity,

fork and ingest, decipher

her epiphanous meaning

under cones of the clear white light,

shone by fleeting Present. But sometimes, when

she lingers long enough,

her diaphanous flecks

spill purpose onto the swell of Future,

transmogrifying into a slip-fit link

so life becomes one long roller chain

of purpose.

~In response to Prompt at dVerse by Merril D Smith : Connections

https://dversepoets.com/2021/01/19/poetics-connections/   

The new year

Here we are, at the cusp of a new year. 

Last year was a painful year as a gigantic wave of loss swelled and spilled onto the banks of the normal idea of normalcy, engulfing many in its folds. It was like as if God had tightly closed the lid on our world and was rattling it like a salt and pepper shaker.

If there is anything the pandemic has taught us, it is, according to me, the need to be kind, the significance of being understanding. It has reminded us the ephemerality of our thoughts, our desires and our existence. As long as we are destined to be here, let us be kind to one another. For, long after a person is gone, what remains alive in the hearts of the living, are the wispy petals of kindness that she has dispersed.    

Let us begin the new year, gripping the torch of hope firmly in our callused hands. Let us stand united and lend each other support till we can together surmount the challenges posed by these trying times and make it to the shore of safety.

Happy new year!

A new poem at Mothers Always Write

Mothers Always Write is a magazine that I have always admired and read regularly. Happy to share that a poem that I have written - 'One Step at a Time' has been published. Here it is: https://mothersalwayswrite.com/one-step-at-a-time/

A stolen afternoon

The creased bedspread undergird your sleep, a sleep I do not want to disturb and have the magical spell and magical run that I have had with my writing, halt like it has arrived at an unexpected dead end. 

But you wake up and open those black eyes that I love so much. I realise my luck has thinned as I cajole sleep to curl into you. I cram in the last keystrokes, allow the sulci and gyri of my cerebellum to form thoughts as clear as possible and click the right buttons before I shut my work for the day and tend to you like I tend to the hidden desires in my heart.