Footsteps

Lavender sky
Before the gold
Then the deep impenetrable evenings
Warm glow from houses
Sends a shiver down my spine
I returned- to a dark house
Waiting for me
In the dark inkiness I waited
September came and left
I waited on Partaking shivering cold dinner
in my bed.

Time indifferent of me
ticked endlessly
Each morning I strike off a day
In the Manipuri- English calendar
Tattered during transit
The calendar showing thasi and purnima;
when not to travel north
I gazed at the calendar
Hoping to revive-
An acoustic memory
Of footsteps against wooden staircase
A soft thud and the sound ascending
Hesitating, a tense lingering silence
A footstep that stops to knock
Stops at my door.

I, Icon

Droplets of Carbonic acid
Clears the fume laden sky for awhile
Smog hangs in the air like a feeble verse
While they transgressed me in a diabolic rhythm
With a strange memory-less nostalgia
I wept at the putrid smell of flesh and fluid
Staring at the mouldy leaves
Amongst which I was cast away

I once had a name
Now I stand mutated by pride and pain
Amidst the acid rain
My tears became raging flames
The self no more me
Yet my pain, they say, is my triumph
Now I am put up for display
Cemented on a pedestal
The icon of womanhood
Covered with pigeon's droppings in a park.

Island

Deer Park

And it was at that age...Poetry arrived in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where it came from, from winter or a river.... -Neruda

Grihang

The Health Minister was travelling to Grihang to inaugurate a Health Sub Centre. Grihang (in Ukhrul) has not seen one for the last 3 decades. The Minister and his assortment of guards showered everyone with a layer of dust..especially neatly dressed children walking on the road.

Memories of another day

Pictures of home; Ingkhon, pukri, - pure nostalgia

On forgetting

Gradually he stopped visiting
My nocturnal dreams
I fight against the overwhelming burden of remembering
Time mercilessly dug a grave
And I unearth everyday
Lest the present cover it in thin layers
Rendering dull the edge of my memories,
bury slumberless nights
and smoothed sharp reminiscences
Until a vacuum of nothingness covered the grave
Yellowed by time like those dry autumn leaves,
Mercilessly shed by sunburnt trees.