thepoeterpoems-blog

[thepoeterpoems-blog]

[thepoeterpoems-blog]

Life feels eaten like a kharbuja.

[thepoeterpoems-blog]

The boat was at the shore.

'Did you see?' My friend asked.

I turned around and it was all amber rays,

Tearing through the clouds.

We ran with our slippers in our hands

The sand was wet and the wind licked our hair.

My friend reached first.

'Chacha,' he asked, 'How was the pull today?' to the fisherman.

'Not good,' he grunted, trying to pull the boat to the shore.

I helped my friend take out the fish bucket.

There was one, nearly-half filled and one empty.

'The pull is not coming good since several days,'

He said, disappointed,

'Something has happed to the fish.

They have sensed something and they are upset.'

I dropped my slippers and locked my toes in and shook it for the sand to fall off.

The fisherman tied the boat to the cocunut tree and asked us to come with him.

We reached a place where the sand started disappearing.

He sat down and started digging.

'What are you doing?' I asked.

'Making a pit,' he said.

We watching him without questioning for a while.

I wanted to ask why he was making a pit, but didn't. We stood for a while and then helped him dig. He guided us when we were going wrong. There was already an idea in his head about how it should look.

It took us ten minutes to make his imagination a reality and fill out nails with soil completely. The fisherman cleaned his hands on his half pant and dhoti. I will trying to carve sand out of my nails when he took out a fish out of the bucket.

'I caught him floating dead in the sea,' the fisherman said and put the fish in the pit. I looked at the fish. I hadn't seen a fish being put into a grave before. It looked alive, it's eye was looking at the sky in peace and defeat. It's whole body reflected the tree nearby, how could it be dead? It no more felt like a fish. It was more or less a human, in fish form. And I felt bad for it. It also had a smell, but it didn't smell of death.

'What killed it?' I asked.

'I don't know,' the fisherman said, 'It's in perfectly fine condition, just dead.'

The fisherman filled the pit with sand, patted it so it doesn't stay loose and said a small player for its soul.

When he rose up to his feet, he asked, 'How much do you want today?'

'Half a kilo would be fine,' my friend said.

When we went home, we washed and cooked it. We fried half of it for the next day's breakfast. After I took a bath, we sat down to eat. That day, I tried but couldn't touch the fish curry at all. There was the same smell. I just ate the rice and left all the fish.

My friend didn' t ask me what happened, 'It's fine,' he said, 'we will feed it to the dogs.'

I nodded. It's strange, while I was eating, I felt like it was the same fish. It is impossible but I couldn't eat fish for several days after that. May be even for weeks.

- the poeter

[thepoeterpoems-blog]

Thanks for sharing. Do read it.

When I was five years old, I became gravely ill. My parents were terrified and the doctors were stymied. Finally, a diagnosis was made: I had spinal meningitis.

At the time, there was not much known about the disease except that it was highly contagious and always fatal. Because of this, the only place for me was in the men’s contagious diseases ward.

They put me in a crib amongst terminally ill men. Invariably, someone died on a daily basis and their bodies would lie there until the night shift attendants could take them away. When the attendant would come in to retrieve the body, I peered out through the bars of my crib and watched them being wheeled away. I can still remember the eerie sound of the iron lungs whirring through the night and then the even odder sound of the silence, when the man inside would die.

My parents drove out every single night to visit me but, to make matters worse, they couldn’t even touch me. The warmth of their arms wrapping around my little body was something I missed more than anything. Their arms would be down at their sides and inside a sterile gown. Masks would cover most of their faces. All I could see were their eyes, and more often than not, they were tearful.

Shortly after I was admitted, I fell into a coma. My spine was a veritable pin cushion, being subject to daily spinal taps. Even though I was in a coma, I can remember hearing the doctors talk about how I was going to die.

My mother started a prayer vigil and around the clock, someone would be praying for me. My father felt helpless and so alienated from his baby boy, I know he spent hours trying to figure out how he could break through this strange world I was living in. He desperately wanted to let me know that he was there … that I wasn’t alone.

Soon he devised a simple plan, and he prayed earnestly, perhaps for the first time in his life, for me to live.

The day I came out of the coma, the words of the doctors came flooding back to me. I thought I was going to die. I was scared and I was confused. Suddenly, I felt something in the bed next to me. I soon learned that my father had left me a present: a small flashlight that had been run through the autoclave so that I could use it. There was a note on it that said, “I love you, Dad.”

Better than any toy that I had been given, that flashlight became my world. Careful not to shine it anyplace that would have been considered intrusive, for fear that it would be taken away, I played with that little beam of light all day long. I would shine it at my toes and under my blankets.

That night, something so exciting happened. When it came time for my parents to visit, I noticed a ray of light coming in through the window at the head of my bed from the parking lot below. I shined my light back at it. It shined back at me with two blinks, then I blinked back twice, then three times. I felt joy for the first time in months. It was my Dad! He had found a way to reach into my world and pull me away from my terror.

My father and I played the flashlight game every night from that day on, and I stopped thinking about dying. He had found a way for me to participate in my own life, even if it had to be in a hospital bed.

Many years later, my father suffered a stroke. He was unable to communicate and I saw so much fear in his eyes. That night, I went back to the hospital, found his window, and shone through it the brightest flashlight I could find. There would be no response.

Shortly after that, my father passed away. At that moment, it dawned on me that my father became the only ray of hope that kept me alive by devising a simple plan of a flashlight and a ray of light.

At the funeral, one particular story recounted to me cut through my grief better than any words of consolation could have. A nurse, who was with my father the night he died, said that he had been agitated and uncomfortable that entire day, “But, at one point, he looked up, towards the heavens, I thought, and he grinned a smile as wide as a river, and his whole body seemed to relax. Strange, I thought. I looked up to see what he was looking at, and there was this light coming in through the window. Kind of like someone was shining a flashlight from the parking lot into his window.” She laughed and said, “Maybe it was just the angels trying to light his way up to heaven…. guess we’ll never know.”

My Ray of Hope by Robert Dixon

[thepoeterpoems-blog]