Beyond Hashtags
A flute seller
trudges up the road
breathing soft, silken music
that floats into the homes
of those who could buy
all the flutes off him,
for small change.
His old melody
flowing out
of the empty reed,
rises and lingers
in the street air.
In
the high rises,
noise-cancelling earphones
shut out the music.
There’s no Insta feed
to tell this story.
The flute seller’s step is light
even as he dangles
the unsold stack of flutes.
Beyond curated stories
there’s a happening life outside—
a subtle medley,
snaking up the streets.
A Pen Sketch
I sketch a narrative
in sharp, clean lines
and then without design
I find myself right there in it,
frizzy hair, toothy smile and all—
I am the habitual photobomb.
I hear a whisper,
erase histories,
let the mind hollow out
like a fishing boat
and the fleeting form
steered by winds
ride the waves.
Cast the net wide.
Mourning
I
sit on the weeping chair
where
termites have bored
deep
into the wood
as
it sinks in slowly.
A
dear family member-
subtracted,
has
fallen silent
on
WhatsApp group.
So
many kind things
are
said about her
to
compensate
for
the cold shoulder
she
got in her time.
The
friendly cleaning robot
buzzing
near me
repeatedly
gobbles up
the
micro dust on just
one
stretch of the floor,
in
the midst
of
ongoing disintegration.
Mourning
is about
letting
the dust settle.
Geetha Ravichandran lives and works in Chennai, India. She enjoys writing short articles and poems. The pandemic has revived her interest in poetry. Over the last year her poems have been published in several online journals including Setu, Borderless, Verse-Virtual, The Literary Nest, Madras Courier, The Pangolin Review. Her poems have been included in a couple of anthologies published by Hawakal –Hibiscus and Shimmer Spring. One of her poems has also been included in the Yearbook of Indian Poetry 2020-2021. She has just recently started exploring the joys of Haiku.
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