Lamposts

Courtesy: http://jeffreyhing.deviantart.com/art/LACMA-lamp-posts-298380841

My mind swims with thoughts of sweet escape;
as days fuse into seasons and seasons glow like
lampposts of life. Each year these lampposts get closer,
glowing with an eerie halo of winter mist. Spring and summer
have waltzed out and fall creeps behind the curtain with tired feet.

I have stopped reading the world in rolled up newspapers,
or counting time with a cuckoo’s tick-tock, tick-tock. Even this bitter
coffee can’t do enough to wake me out my reveries. My heart is like
bees that would forever hang on to the morning, sucking the nectar of youth.
Aah youth that has escaped, like a cloud of hot steam hovering over the whining kettle.

Praise

Inside the sitting room of my memory

play the retired ghosts of past years.

School’s out. The summer heat shimmers

so bright, even coolers and fans cannot

bring down the day’s fever. In the garden

a chameleon changes colors faster than a

thirteen year old changes her mind.

The trees weary of the heat droop

over; dropping gold coins that curl up

when dry, flocking into heaps of fallen pride

waiting to be swept away the next morning.

In the sitting room my father irons a week’s

worth of his white collar job into perfectly

creased shirts and pants. I lean over into the

floor painting carnivals of landscapes, rich pastels

bleeding into the white marble floor.

Inside the kitchen my mother tosses red chilies

into pots of simmering curry hot as day. And my sister

straightens her curls with dreamy fingers, musing up her

life in teenage novels.

How sad that we should never offer praise to the simpler moments

of life, at least not until decades later when the sitting room with its

resident memories has gone up in gold and silver smoke

billowing into the cool, black night…

Inspired by DailyPost

Thresholds

We find ourselves on the threshold of life changing moments, at least a few times in our lives. Thresholds may be subtle or more pronounced “aha” moments when we experience life with the full realization that life as we knew it has changed irrevocably, and that we have stepped into the realms of “no return”. We all experience these moments during the natural transition of life; moving from infancy into adolescence, and then again into adulthood, and so forth. There are other moments when we experience a sudden loss or a deeper life altering experience that changes the direction of our lives forever.

Life’s major thresholds such as: graduation, marriage, birth, divorce, death etc bring feelings of anticipation, anxiety, trepidation, joy, anger or loss. But then there are thresholds that are so obscure and possibly unrelated; we do not even know we crossed them until much later. These could be Historic moments that are out of our control, and change our world for the better or worse. Examples include; landing of man at moon, Reunification of Germany, Assassination of JFK, bombing of the World Trade Center and so forth. We may as well have been a part of these momentous times as they happened, but the full effect of such incidents is truly understood only in hindsight.

Although change is a continuous process, thresholds are distinct points in our lives that open a floodgate of change, awareness and awakening. Because the only thing constant in life is change, it behooves us to look at change in a positive light and with the stoic acceptance that everything happens for the best. Each change no matter how uncomfortable, opens in itself a pandora’s box of opportunity, learning and wisdom. Inpired by Weekly photo challenge