She reads me out some lines of hers –
Her fingerprints of pensive nights,
When solitude reveals the depths
Her hyperactivity hides.
She reads them from her notebook leaves –
Her kindergarten alphabet
Betraying childlike innocence
That walks in adult silhouette.
My fingers touch her words and feel
The pulsing pressure of her pain,
Engraved in, not her mother tongue,
But buffered English of restraint.
She says she does not write to write.
She writes to free the boiling steam
She has repressed for so so long,
It poems out in whistling screams.
And here I sit, adulted child,
Who writes to write and write again,
Who fuels the stove to fuel the steam,
Producing poem-worthy pain.
Minakhi Misra 