NAPOWRIMO – Day 0 [Favorite Bird Prompt]

Old World Flycatcher

A station,
parallel tracks, announcements,
and empty steel chairs

flickering lights in the darkness,
the night will turn in another day
but tonight I revisit that station in
Vellore,

we were waiting for the journey,
the path towards our home.

A city,
dust, streets, horns, accidents,
and us, returning with some
leftover hope…

everything is fleeting in this
human world,
everything is flowing towards
that eternal call.

Amidst such distant emotions of
loss tonight I hear another song

Ovid’s Philomela let herself free
by entangling herself into wings
to keep the truth hidden…

and this is repeated again and
again!

Keats’ Ode could not bring back
my heart from those corridors
where I still stand and witness my
mother’s agonies

perhaps humanity could have
saved her,
perhaps a MRI could have saved
her.

Yet when I think of those warm
brown feathers, I hear the echoes
of words from a class –
“a poet is a nightingale who sits in
darkness, and sings to cheer its own
solitude with sweet sounds…”

This bird sings of existence -
it exists, I exist, we shall exist
till nature calls us back to merge
with eternity.

Anindita…

[“a poet…” – quote by P.B. Shelley]