Ruchira's Ramblings

Day 17. Today I wrote a haiku for International Haiku Day, using the phrase 'gibbous moon'. This was the prompt from the Instagram page Kavyajananipoetry. The prompt from  napowrimo.net  was quite cool, it was just that I wanted to catch up with some of my reading lists, so I wrote only one poem. But I did think about the other prompt, you know, the prompt not taken, as it were, and it brought back memories. So what was it? Dogs, All the dogs you've known in your life. The prompt was  developed by the comic artist Lynda Barry, and it asks you to think about  dogs you have known, seen, or heard about , and then use them as a springboard into wherever they take you. Cool yeah? I have never had a dog. When I was young, I was terrified that the neighbourhood strays would bite me and then I would have to take 17 injections (I don't exactly remember if the number was 17, but it was a big number). As I recall, the dogs seemed to bark a lot and always seemed angry, but ...

Will you be my forever, Will you be my light? Shall we walk along the river Hand in hand all night? When I was 12, my best-friend tried to keep pace, waving as lovers do in slow-motion movie scenes, as our car slowly backed away from my childhood, forever. And I left behind the alphabets in three languages, and numbers, the basketball court that I had never liked anyway, and half my heart. I brought with me memorized phone numbers, and pin codes and promises to keep on a dark snowy road in a bright, hot country.  No wonder they melted. Later, I would learn of the road not taken and ponder on the what-ifs, but that was many many years after love had taken my hand again, when I had forgotten to be surprised even by the absence of pain. Sometimes I try recalling that 12 year old, to touch some part of that bereaved solitude crying in silence in a class of strangers. Where has she gone? Among my decades old accumulated paperwork, there is an old handwritten essay ...