Pelling: A Fragment

Shouvik Narayan Hore

The Sun was Cold.

Between two shafts of clouds

The moisture hung pale and sad; the sound

Of mountain music had swept his sense. Here

Foams and bubbles of mid-season rivers

All blue-some streams had revealed all white,

Had flowed as valleys had answer’d to the morn.

Here, on both sides of the two faced mount

Were Men; boys outweighed by visitor’s bags,

Dragging and pushing and trailing their things-

Banded at the fore - their cheeks berried,

As’f apples had blushed in May month’d teens.

No men in midst were there. No middle-aged man;

A few who lingered at waists of the girls,

Had left no sooner the clocks struck nine.

The Sun was warm.

Reaping and rhyming a band of girls

Walked softly but scarce raised eyes - their song

An accented hymn - their faces sparse with joy

Was seen, though the Sun was warm with heat.

Outkidded at length by looks and their age

A suckling, a choleric kid and a boy

With others his age would by the vale,

Would disturb the mountain flowers growing there.

Few furlongs away two sisters who quiet

Would walk to the rock face; dip their palms

At a eunuch fountain dying by the hour,

And slowly beneath a pavement slick

Would curl and enter the slide stuck near.

Yet men past their sixtieth year were there,

Who clogged with woolen clothes right to the toe,

With shrunken eyelids, worsened kins stood clear

Of foreign men - as if proud of the tribe.

That pride of its aging pattern showed man thus

The pride of an ancient making of God.

Shouvik Narayan Hore has published two books of poetry The Horizon of Thoughts and Poet’s Choice (Vol. 2). He has published poetry in the US, the UK and in various Indian anthologies. His research papers and treatises have appeared in Gnosis, Camaraderie, IJLL and The Literary Voyage, and has won a National Poetry competition organized by the Poona College of Arts, Science and Commerce. He is presently pursuing M.Phil. at the University of Hyderabad, Telangana.

Contemporary Literary Review India. Vol 5, No 1, CLRI February 2018 | eISSN 2394-6075