NAPOWRIMO – Day 2 [poem about place/time/space]

Three windows with blue

and white-striped curtains,
a box-bed with seven cushions
and a purple satin bedcover

red carnations, book shelves,
an old cupboard, some centuries
old artifacts –

a room in a king’s two hundred
years old summer palace

a reading table made from the
woods of a tree that must had
been born in the forests of Ooty

the Britishers had left, yet their
buildings stand strong all around
the corners of the Commercial
Street, Charing Cross and all
across the Nilgiris.

The room has a door that leads to
the garden, facing the mountains
at a distance

pristine mornings, clear blue
afternoons, cold mystic nights,
kind humans, cheerful children,
a white cat and a black dog with
croaking frogs and two lost owls
perched on some nearby trees

the silence of the mountains, and
a scared city heart with the fear
of the dark

a darkness that lingers peacefully
as the essence of nature…

Sometimes languages differ and
humans feel claustrophobic, yet I
have spent many days, serving the
children of the Blue Mountain
School, Dilkhush Mahal Ooty –
Tamil Nadu 643001

a residential school in a majestic
old summer palace, amidst the
Nilgiris

a beauty in all sense, an experience
for the explorer’s heart!

Songs of lands, heard-unheard
travel through memories of time,
stories of humans, said-unsaid
float with the breeze and reach
the roots of earth

the mountains hold fossils of
life and space, entwined with
vibrations of ancient footsteps

yet connections are not always
meant to be wise,

but a fallen phoenix will struggle
to rise!

Anindita Bose