Old Woman In The Moon

As a child, I was very choosy about food. It was a pain to feed me. The only possible way to make me eat my meal was to distract me with stories. My mother was a wonderful narrator, and she had a rich stock of stories to tell me. My father, however, would have a hard time as I would ask questions when the stories did not make sense, and I could tell when he was making them up.
Once, when I had a stomach infection, I woke up in the middle of the night due to pain. My mother went to the kitchen to cook the only thing that I would agree to eat those days, and my father picked me up and took me out on the verandah. I must have been four years old then. My father wiped the tears off my face and showed me the moon and the pattern of an old woman in it. The memory of that night still transports me to that verandah with the cool summer breeze drying my tears, the sound of utensils clattering in the kitchen as my mother prepared my food, the moonlight washing the street outside, the comfort of my father's lap, the peacefulness of midnight with the knowledge that the world is asleep, and the pattern of a kind old woman watching over us from the moon.

Somewhere, something inside me had captured the beauty of it all, for me to cherish years later, on a similar summer night.

Faking It

I understood that not a lot of people got the perspective behind this poem. Of course, its art, and open to interpretation, but I would not want you to miss the message. The poem is written from the perspective of someone who is deep in the abyss of prostitution and has lost all hope of coming out of it. Hopefully, this knowledge will add more meaning to the poem as you read it.

I twirl a toe,

let out a sigh

Its practised

and perfected in a classroom

I was forced to enter

I am the clatter you hear

on glass bangles, slowly breaking

I heard the same clatter

in the shatter of my hopes

long ago

I am a lesser human

I pray to a lesser God, perhaps

who is as polymorphous

as the dark street I live in

that turns bright red at night

My God too, changes faces

comfortably

Perhaps she too is accustomed

to the only rule of my trade

'Faking it'

I loved music once

I'm deaf to it now

It helps to be deaf,

and blind,

and numb,

and to fake it.

P.S. Thanks to Daily Love for featuring one of my stories today. :)


Linked to Poets United. Visit them and read a lot of inspiring poems. Savour art! :)

Sometimes

Found this little prompt on Weekend Wordsmith and realized it conveys just what I wish to convey today:

Sometimes, its just me -

the reader and the writer
united in a moment of wordlessness
so that those volatile crystal dreams
are safer 

locked within the airtight boxes
of silence