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






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