Catch it where it falls

 

Catch it Where it falls

A single raindrop

Fell from the sky

And enriched the ground,

Hitherto dry,

As the flower buds opened

To salute its arrival

The animals bellowed,

For another year of survival.

 

I observed inwards,

Towards myself,

And a drop fell on me,

An ink blot on the surface of consciousness,

And then I had an epiphany,

For each moment is a symphony,

Of a million hues and experiences,

An unfathomable amount of details

In perfect harmony.

 

The graceful and exquisite pattern

Turned suddenly into a torrential downpour,

Animals turned from a slow ecstatic appreciation,

To a violently passionate encore,

The leaves which previously looked drooped and dew laden,

Were rejuvenated in a deluge,

Of course, some flowed away in the storm,

But others were reinvigorated and transformed,

And the peacock’s dance reached its zenith.

 

I again looked inside myself,

And got scared from what I saw,

A beast in the abyss threatening to blow me away,

Passionate and vicious and unbearably raw,

It accepted all of life in all of its experiences,

A constant explosion in all of my senses,

But it often overflows the reservoir,

So I built a dam around it and locked me away from myself.

 

The water flowed down a rusted metal pipe,

From the cement tank for its ‘purification’,

What was once the most clean and genuine,

Couldn’t baptise the irony of the situation,

Nor could its filth quench a fish’s thirst,

Or enrich the animal’s natural experience.

What became one with the ground was no longer in cyclic motion,

We remember with regret and gratitude,

But in the moment we constrict our emotions,

And writers no longer write with their blood,

A disaster of human making,

Which we assured ourselves was better than a flood.

Contrary to their character,

Time and tide stood still.

 

I looked at the film reel playing in front of me,

A potpourri of my memories,

And a reminder of my naivety,

Isn’t that what it was?

For I used to be so dumb and simple,

And now look what I have become,

The complexity of human nature was surely never a part of me,

Weren’t my old memories as “genuine” as they could be?

Or atleast I told that to myself,

While grabbing onto a storehouse of memories,

Not fully lived,

And also, the camera for the present,

As I looked upon the harvesting cistern,

Which I was no longer a part of.

“Catch it where it falls!” I remarked,

Each moment and each raindrop,

Trying to disregard,

The passage our concreted jungles stopped,

But remember,

Absorbing water only strengthens concrete.

 

                                                                                                                                  -Chinmay Sharma