UNSTEADY CHILD ON A PORCH

by RK Biswas

Listen: Freedom is the honey doled 

out from a spoon. A coffee-spoon 

if you please.  Choose

your steps with care. The sun alights 

upon your eyes and casts shadows. The path is cold

and lonely across sun-warmed stones. The space 

ahead is forlorn. What lingers in your thoughts? 

You are hardly ripe

enough for meaningful contemplation. But time 

is a path, and a stairway too, leading somewhere

or nowhere at all. And few steps on 

you will know your gait, your speed, and perhaps 

even your direction. Who will you be then? What 

will you become once you go from here 

to there? You look out from the safety 

of your porch with happy expectations. What if 

you took a tumble? Would you still be 

the you of your first tender imaginings? 

How will you tackle the shadows 

of unchartered places? Plant a foot

before and after each unmapped 

step? Will your heart ever hark 

back to the day of your first bruise? 

The steps tempt. The steps call, and will 

do so again and again. How you let in 

the sun is entirely up

to you. Be illuminated. Be blinded. Be 

warm within your skeletal-self. Scorch 

your feet. No matter what, 

the steps will always be there. Calling.

And, a day will come when you will go.  A day 

will come when freedom will be just

like the fine sand grains you had once held 

in your chubby fists, gurgling with laughter 

as you watched  them slip 

from your fingers and run free. Your eyes 

were so wide then. Entranced

to see the sands falling through whimsical air.

Alive and escaping. 

* * * * *

RK Biswas is a writer from India. Her novel "Culling Mynahs and Crows" was published by Lifi Publications, India. Her poetry and fiction have been published widely. She was first runner up in the 2016 DNA-OOP Short Fiction Contest, India. She won second prize in the India Currents Katha Literary Fiction Prize for her story ‘It Comes from Uranus” in June 2016. Her novel was listed as one of the 20 most popular books published in 2014 by The Readers’Club, Delhi. In 2012 she won first prize in the Anam Cara Writer's Retreat Short Story Contest. Her poem "Bones" was a Pushcart Nominee from Cha: An Asian Literary Journal in 2010. Her poem "Cleavage" was long listed in the Bridport Poetry Prize in 2006 and also was a finalist in the Aesthetica Contest in 2010. Her story Ahalya's Valhalla was among Story South's Notable stories of the net in 2007.