Last Question

The only question that always remains unanswered on the last part of the Battle..

Should I run away from all the impossibilities I may confront...

Or should I await the possibilities I am drawn close to..

The Race

I set out the track, the hurdling, and the score-board

I am in my own race course.

On my knees, with my face up

And with a shot in the air, I begin my race.

A race in which

I run against the Old Me

While I watch Myself run as the audience 

There is blood in my eyes

I am drenched in sweat, out of breathes and noiseless in my ears

I just feel my feet strike the ground and swing back

The Goal gets blurred with every plunge.  

At times I am ahead of her

In the next turn She leaves me behind

The Spectating I claps, anticipating my conquest

Then bites nails enjoying the uncertainty

It is all dusty mist around

And, in the next extended leap, with my eyes closed

I bounce at the Finish Line.

I try to look up with my drained stooping shoulders, the merriment of My Triumph

The race course is echoing with Me clapping around, cheering Myself staggeringly

She stands quiet in the dark, withdrawing from the limelight I am the part of.

We both know that this is the last time we are seeing each other.

Her teary unspeakable eyes declare- “I vacate the chair  I won last season. Enjoy your term”.

While I move forward towards the stage, the Old Me disappears somewhere in the past. 

The Girl my Mother gave birth to

She was a young beautiful young woman in Eighties. She had boys around trying to woo her. She got married before she could complete her studies. She had a baby in her womb before she could learn how to hold a baby in her arms. This brief is her story. 

She lost her fragile girlish body to be a house wife, a hard working daughter in law, a vigilant care taker and a responsible mother.

This girl was my mother…as I imagined of her gazing at the black and white family photo album and the life she had lived in the last three decades.

 She had handled her own share of woes and she had too walked on the patchy paths that she was destined to. 

I was in pain to think of the difficult times she faced probably when she, like all of us, wanted to leave it all and run away. And, like most of us, she didn’t.

But one questioned that kept banging my head…”Did she really give birth to the daughter she wanted to.”

An inner voice grabbed me by my neck and asked me- Was I really the reward of her struggle.… Had I ever thought of what Mom had imagined about me.

The moment when she would have held her baby in her arms, she would have seen of the flash of the little world that she had created. And with every passing day, she'd have pinned hopes from her. 

Probably she wanted that little bundle to grow up as strong as she never had been in her decisions. Probably she wanted her to be a girl who would master her own destiny and fly around the world. Probably she wanted her to have wings of fire and roots of her dreams. Probably she looked upon her as the answer of her all her incapacities. 

Or, may be, she wanted her to be a woman of forbearance, a girl who could create her progenies and from whom her little particles of her own shadows would walk on little steps when her hair would be grey. Probably she wanted her to have a similar extended family as she created and nurtured. May be that would have 'completed' her.

I wasn’t sure. 

I realized how I had befailed her in more than one ways. I had befailed her because I chose my own path of struggle and nomadic life. I had befailed her because I had turned down the only legacy that she had to entrust me- “to Trust Life”. 

Incomplete Poems

On my way back home today
I met some Incomplete poems.

I watched them from afar
Some were headless
Most were identityless.

I observed to find to which lands they belonged to.

Some carried parts of the sky in their Pocket
Some shone like Gold
Some had shoes with a worn out Sole
Some were Languageless

But they all held each other
By Words and Time
Don't know in oblivion or awe or hope..