DIM LIGHTS

A Message to Readers: The poem talks about the relationship between two individuals, an unusual pairing, where two misfits give comfort to each other. Society has its own ways of looking down upon them, but company gives them the strength to bear it. There are bonds that we form, in our lives, that are not traditionally acceptable but give us immense amount of happiness. In fact, they are so integral to our being, that if anything happens to the other person or to the relationship, a part of us dies with it. Perhaps you can read this to remind yourself that you are somebody's light, an anchor and are significant to them.

 

Sweet, pleasant mornings,

Salty from the showers before;

Azuring leaves dangling from trees amongst clouds,

Green canopies, guarding children’s innocence.

 

Squeaky shoes, a skip in step,

Pigtails swishing in the air,

Excited fingers criss-crossing, tracing lines of fate,

Eyeing the mud hut at the cornerstone.

 

Hours spent in conversation, intertwining perspectives of the grey-haired and the baby-teethed,

Of wondrous fairies, under-the-bed monsters, the Sun and the Moon, constellations bright and twinkling;

Harmless, and yet the elders fretted, as they always did,

The strange pair’s style of battling side glances and whispers, unique.

 

Within hay-stack walls, wounds tended, of spousal loss and of a neglected childhood,

Screams of a failing union echoing in young ears, driven out by a flute ninety-years-old, as old as the musician,

Clapping along nursery rhymes, warming cold hands of loneliness,

Two dim lights, brightening the other’s aura.

 

A sweet, pleasant morning,

Salty from the showers before;

The ritualistic quartet knock,

An ominous quiet, unusual silence, anxious breaths.

 

A gentle touch on the rickety door,

That never was kept locked;

Traces of deathly hollowness,

Echoing footsteps of small feet, halting at a collapsed figure’s head.

 

Rapid blinking, a sense of panic and despair,

A whitened wrinkled face staring at tear-filled eyes;

They say twin graves were dug out that day,

When one light blows out, the other follows suit.