By: Prithvijeet Sinha

In the good light,
you emerge like a hooded shadow.
Then when the eyes
are rubbed by the
hands of an interested
morning,
you become
the seraph with a
pencil beak
and red-black spikes for feathers on your head.

In that glow of
early morning’s
miraculous ventilation,
you are arrayed
amidst acorns
not taken by rodents
and tamarinds disarrayed from their place
in wooded high-rises.

Flashes of information
cut through the day’s flesh,
telling us
we cannot choose elysian fields forever;
propriety
is a fatal flaw in human nature.

The tedium of convention
yawns low among
strange fruits
on a garden’s bed
next to
a cabin of ghosts.

There’s a gloomy distaste that is almost as
pungent as the smell of sulphur
in an infected room.

I am only human
as far as I can tell.
I have nothing much
to speak
about my message
or my medium of instruction.

But it all changes with
you.

You come
like a hooded shadow
first
and all
across the ponds,
new eternities birth
themselves
drop by dripping drop.

I know
a lot of other feathers
are of expatriates
crossing this nation’s
avian colonies.
An exodus awaits
even the wetlands.

Without wounding their spirit to soar,
you come
like a seraph
to the twine of habit
and visitations
outside my balcony door.

You may not know it yet
but your little self
has the midwifery
to birth new days,
a little “chuk, chuk, chuk,
tu, tu, tu”
reaching across the
older spines of
pickle jars
and glass windows.

There’s something far from ordinary about your song.
You are the patron saint
of my morning hours.

Prithvijeet Sinha is a proud resident of the cultural epicenter that is Lucknow. His prolific published credits encompass poetry, musings on the city, cinema, anthologies, journals with national and international repertoires as well as a blog(https://anawadhboyspanorama.wordpress.com/). His life-force resides in writing, in the art of self-expression.