Dear Ma & Childhood by Saumya Srivastava
Childhood
The foals frolic and frisk on the lush grass
Of the ranch
With a happiness, long forgotten by adults.
The grasses crunch loudly under my boots
Like the powdered snow under our boots
When I was young and happy like the foals
Every December holiday at Cincinnati
Was all about climbing birches and on them
Hung the dandelions like we were once hung
On a huge, swing pendulum that spun
like a vertical planet or a chiming clock
That used to deceive us into believing in permanence
And it was exhilarating to do that in the same lifetime
As it was to read Iliad by Homer in the corner, curled up.
In my woolgatherings, I experience it all again
And my heart thumps the same number as it did
Except that I am not supposed to and I busy
Myself in weeding out and filling boxes of eggs in the hatchery but,
When a strange, willowy laughter emerges from the playground
It reminds me of where my happiness went and
A different kind of happiness supplants.
Dear Ma
The fire touches my bare bones filled with dread,
As if I am a lonesome canoe wandering across the Atlantic,
But my mind remains hazy
Like the world outside when I peak through the little hole in my canvas
From where even the stars fail to shine through
How would I?
But I grasp for the sequoia-breathed quilt grandma gave me, when I passed high
school,
With crawling colours, Like the shades of grey
But Dad’s grey eyes always flickered with felicity
So I remain uncertain on my assumptions
Like I do while I hide under the blood soaking Earth
From the glinting wicked, hoar tempest
That reminds me of your hair and the way your comb struggled through them
As you sang like the lake I learnt to swim in
With Greta, whose face I don’t remember anymore
But her perfect braid and her perfect holiday plans
Have you taken any of those since I left?
Or does the airplane still scare you?
Don’t tell Dad but I get scared of heights myself sometimes
And my blood curdles as they clamour up pointy hills,
Zipping and hissing their perilous swords,
Ready to tug death closer and closer
And Oh Ma! Closer and closer it comes,
Says the stout man on the telephone,
Maybe about the inching scorpion on the windowsill or
His day of divorce,
Or what you and I know is.