Spring Issue: Poems on Children and Childhood

Hallway— Rebecca M. Ross

My parents’ apartment building

has the same hallway floors

from when I was a kid

but now

getting outside

takes fewer strides

of longer steps

avoiding lines & cracks

designed to break your mama’s back

When the hallway

(seemingly double wide back then)

stretched to eternity,

time was forever

I memorized every inch of pattern

every grouping of design

I cast every childhood spell to avoid

floor-influenced bad luck

Hundreds of coats of polish

I’d raced and stumbled

And slid upon

Dozens of paint jobs
witnessed my comings and goings

from babyhood to parenthood

Now

the sigh and hum of elevators

opening and closing

on the floors of my life

reminds me of time’s passage,

of stories that must come to an end,

of floors that will be polished

for young feet

that will race towards a distant horizon

only to find

it’s just the end

of the hall.

“Garbha Vidya”: A Triptych— Basudhara Roy

Week 4

I am shovelling a dream

out of nothingness

It hangs as vapour in my thoughts

as prayer on breath

There are reasons it refuses

to bear a shape

Laughs my urge for form

into formlessness

It is faith’s sinews

at work against misgivings

Water picking its way

across gibber plains

Desire breathing vitality

into the shadow’s self

If the vision is tenacious

nothing takes it away

And God smiles

as woman woos life from clay

***

Week 20

I think of you who listens

Not a breath escaping

your capacious hearing

You are stillness

waiting to be filled

with the misery of sound

So that sound

may be drained of its

curse of cacophony

To judge your listening

by your speech

would be fallacy

For your speech will arrive

like my lost years

finding me in exile.

***

Week 39

the ritual of river running into sea

of the pared fangs of a story

of panes of air hoaxed by light

one sky that marks both start and end

strengthened by indifference 

and the tripod of faith wobbly forever

from here it isn’t about how far

you can go

or of what will come

it is the balancing act

for as long as you can balance

the dough of pain on a breath’s safety pin

and the disappearing act

for

when you can’t 

this pulling out from time’s printer

life’s garbled sheet

and making a clean breast of it.

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