The Sound of Distant Ankle Bells

from google

The Sound of Distant Ankle Bells …

​

Memories of those delicate tinkling bells,

casually fastened around calloused feet,

take hold of my waking moments,

and fling my thoughts back to a distant time,

where folk-songs were heartily sung,

joyful, yet hopelessly out of rhyme.

I barely saw her, a construction labourer perhaps,

hauling bricks, cement, anything, on a scorching Delhi day,

while in the semi-shade of a Gulmohar tree, her infant silently lay.

A cacophony of thoughts such as these swirl around,

yanking me away from the now, to my cow-dung littered childhood playground.

Now, a lifetime of displacement has hushed the jangling chorus of the past,

to a faint trickle of sounds, as distant as an ocean heard inside tiny sea-shells,

and,

I know, that the orchestral nostalgic crescendo, rises, dips, and swells,

as tantalisingly near, yet a world of time away, as were the tinkling of her ankle-bells.

from google