by Vinita Agrawal
[box]Everyone desires for a life filled with spark and vigour. However, this spark is elusive – it doesn’t stay on forever in one’s life. Vinita Agrawal writes a poem that describes this spark through situations that are characterised more by its absence than presence or in other words, the dark moments of life when it goes missing.[/box]I am a spark,
Don’t expect me to be there every time.
I am absent
In the debris of a broken home
Where the sun never rises,
Where conversation falls on deaf ears,
Where food grows cold on empty dinner tables.
I disappear when parents divorce,
Splitting a child in two like a sheet of bad origami,
Making an innocent world go askew like a paper plane;
No one really cares where it lands.
Count me out
When mothers send sons to the battlefield
And await their return till the end of time,
Till their eyes dim and hands wizen,
Till tears dry into coarse salty streaks on wrinkled cheeks.
When promises of love, made on rosy garden paths
Amidst summery mango scents,
Crumble,
The girl loses me forever.
She marries quietly –
Someone of her parents’ choice,
Lives without me
But smiles her way to a silver anniversary.
I am older than flint but
Younger than a new born moment
I am a spark –
Too dangerous for adults to flirt with
And too explosive for adolescents to handle.
I am a spark –
Always good to have around life and inside you
But terrible if extinguished.
For I leave behind throbbing silvery scars,
Like whips of lightning
Glinting on the grassy morass of dreams.
Vinita Agrawal is a Delhi based writer and poet and has been published in international print and online journals.
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