All limbs right now,
you feel like a tender grasshopper
A daddy long legs,
lime green, supple, raw;
even your leg rubs are squeaks.
And it feels like the garden mocks
your noise, your silences, even
the pauses you take to exhale.
Your breath is timorous with
fraught expectations. Your disappointments have turned the bush
you hide in,
to a nut- brown shade;
with leaves of crimson, that blush
your growing pangs away.
Each day these leaves fall, litter the ground in tear shapes and we,
who bend to sweep,
weep at their fallen grace.
You’re a creature that sleeps the
day away, unless awakened,
and comes out to play with
curly lashed smiles at night.
In the safety of darknesses and corners you’ve
carefully spun, you reveal your shades-
shy librettos and candied tenors,
tender contraltos that melt away like
treacle.
You allow lightning quick glimpses of your soul between gulps and nervous titters,
then hop away to hide
and build
for the coming day.
Such exquisiteness you have, such
tender vividity, it bleaches my soul
with its incandescence.
But you cannot see it.
Not yet.
For that, you have to wait.
Your time is nascent-
It waits with me, eagerly counts down,
to your
eventual unfurling.
An MA from Kings College, London, Aparna Sanyal is a writer, theatre producer, and award- winning furniture designer. A popular Spoken Word poet, she performs at events across venues in India. Her page poetry has appeared/ is forthcoming in literary journals such as Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, The Visitant, The Same, Leaves of Ink, The Paragon Journal, Duane’s Poetree, A Writer’s Haven Blog, et al. She lives with her 3-year-old son and husband in Pune, India.
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