The Girl Who Burnt Bridges

Once,

When the world was still round,

And mornings smoothly slipped into evenings,

A really lost little girl

Realized

That she couldn’t do with rickety bridges.

So she burnt them all.

And burnt some more, as she grew up.

“That’s not the right thing to do.

 The world is a really lonely place,” she was told.

She said that she could

Deal with bouts of loneliness,

But couldn’t bear

The nervous drone of a life

That moved on weak, rusting hinges.

“It’s good to have people there for oneself.

It’s good to keep alive

The possibility of mending bridges,” she was told.

But the girl,

Slightly crazy as she was,

Thought the whole concept of future

Utterly misplaced;

The obsession with permanence,

Vulgar.

Now what do you do with people like her?

How do you reason with them?

These people,

Who would live either on soaring peaks

Or in abysmal valleys,

But nowhere in between.

People who want to make

Each day

A matter of life and death.

                ***

©Rasagya Kabra, November 17, 2011

Molten Days

“I feel like a dark house,” he said.

“A dark house,

With a small window

That overlooks a narrow lane.”

“The window bestows me

With a small square of sunshine

That melts my days

And turns them into the air I breathe.”

“Sometimes,

A smiling stranger walking down the lane,

The fluttering loose end

Of a woman’s bright sari,

Catch my eye

And I tell myself,

‘You can see real things.

You are not dead,

Not just yet.’”

     ***

©Rasagya Kabra, November 20, 2011

Teardrop on Grey Rock

The memory knows this place

From your telling,

Before the eyes can even

Submit their version.

I walk along the sea

That sparkles too bright,

In the sun too hot

For bare arms.

A small tear drop

Falls on a grim grey rock,

And forms a dark liquid line

Demarcating the path

Between my longing

And your rationalizing.

              ***

© Rasagya Kabra, November 7, 2011