Aug 15, 2016 Ramblings and Musings, The Daily Post
I’m confused, confounded, bewildered, addled, puzzled, perplexed, mystified, bemused, stupefied, baffled, bamboozled, muddled and nonplussed by:
- Practically ANY government form I have to fill out.
- Trump and his followers
- People who don’t know what irony means
- People who don’t know what sarcasm means
- My vacillating about whether to do this one thing I love to do, or the other thing I love to do, or the third thing I like to do. (And thus, I while away the hours contemplating what might have been.)
- People who would judge me by my shoes.
Or feet.
Or nose.
Or my being
As Confucius (or his Internet Persona) says, “To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous.” Alas, this baffled me. (Hasty parenthetical remark added later: Of course, it didn’t! I suddenly wanted to pretend to feel what it felt like to be a supporter of You-know-Who.)
I need to change the entire course of history right now.
Or, perhaps, after I’ve had my watermelon popsicle.
That’s all.
See you tomorrow – if I still exist in fact, as opposed to existing in
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Tags: #Confused, #DailyPrompt, #Postaday, #Ramblingsandmusings, #TheDailyPost
Aug 15, 2016 Free Verse, Original Poetry, The Daily Post
Tanglements
©August 15th, 2016
By Vijaya Sundaram
When the string comes unraveled,
It’s time to die.
It’s when it gets entangled
That life struggles forth.
And if it’s not complicated,
Is it worth it?
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Tags: #Complicated, #DailyPrompt, #OriginalPoetrybyVijayaSundaram, #Postaday, #TheDailyPost
Aug 15, 2016 Original Poetry, Senryu, The Daily Post
Reach
©August 15th, 2016
By Vijaya Sundaram
She reached for the stars
But got a handful of dirt.
In every grain, Life.
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Tags: #DailyPrompt, #OriginalPoetrybyVijayaSundaram, #Postaday, #Reach, #TheDailyPost
Aug 15, 2016 Original Short Story, The Daily Post
Song-Bird (A Fragment)
©August 12th, 2016
By Vijaya Sundaram
Every day, Kavita sat at her window, and gazed out, waiting.
What she was waiting for, nobody knew – not her mother, not her father, not her sister, or brother, who were twins, and five years older than she was.
Kavita was five years old, and mute. There was a sweetness to her, an air of abstraction, and her family was protective of her. They had already decided not to send her to school, and since they lived in a part of the country where nobody paid much attention to whether children went to school or not, they were safe from the prying reach of a meddlesome school board.
Kavita would hum tunelessly under her breath, and trace little patterns on the wall with her finger while she waited for her father to come home after work. She would hum tunelessly while watching for her elder brother and sister come home from school.
Kavita watched the animals on the street go about the business. Dogs running, barking and defecating, cats strolling with tails high, leaping onto walls and glaring balefully at everyone, cows strolling about, secure in their holiness, but starved just the same, eating whatever little grass they could scrounge up.
Dabbawallahs would sail by on their bicycles, carrying tiffins to schools and offices. An occasional fight would break out on the streets, and people would intervene in the dusty scuffle and flying of fists.
And Kavita would hum.
Her mother watched over her. The humming did not bother her. It was like the music of her days.
Kavita would turn to her mother after the midday meal, and point to the back door of their one-story house. In the back, outside their high back wall, a gutter flowed, filled with stinking sewage water. A few white hens with red eyes and red crests puck-pucked, rooting about the dusty soil inside the yard, bored, but ever ready to eat bugs. A few, straggly tomato and brinjal plants grew there, and a jasmine bush was heavy with flowers. They had a little patch of spinach growing, too. There were chilies and capsicum, too. Her mother had grown up in a village on a small farm, and knew about growing food. This brought relief to their family, because her father worked as a clerk in an office, and brought in just enough to keep his family housed, fed and clothed. Thank goodness, they owned the house, which had belonged to his father and his father’s father before him.
Kavita, pointing, would ask to go out to the back, and there she’d sit under the shade of a dusty mango tree, and watch the chickens and their three goats. Her mother knew she was safe there, because the wall was high, and there was no gate in the back, so she’d let her sit there, while she went about her chores, washing the clothes, hanging them up to dry, sweeping out the house, watering the plants.
No one knew quite what Kavita was thinking. She hummed and hummed, and did not say a word.
Her mother would listen to All-India Radio while she did her chores, and the sound of it soothed her tired spirit, for she was always tired. The constant worry about her youngest child, a worry which she hid from Kavita made her bones che. She’d sing along.
And Kavita hummed along.
Music flowed in her body like a river. She was surrounded by it, she thought in music, she dreamed in music, and loved in music. And she loved her mother for giving her this music that poured out from the magic box, and made her happy.
And unhappy.
For she wanted, more than anything, to sing.
(Perhaps, to be continued)
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Tags: #DailyPrompt, #Obsessed, #OriginalShortStory, #Postaday, #TheDailyPost