The gift of rank

Image Arun Bansal

If you haven’t stood still and smelled your rankness;

haven’t been walled in, contained, desperate

to freefall into fresh, swirl to someplace else,

tired of knocking against the bricks of wells.

If you haven’t dried into a narrow smudge

or a slimy thread of odorous sludge;

if you haven’t faced down that final threat

that sucks off moisture from each drop of breath

and hangs it up between deathlike and death -

you haven’t learnt what waters teach us yet.

The lotus blooms only when waters still;

and still can be rank, but also tranquil.

Even rankness is a gift, nothing to spurn;

waters flow, and still, and stagnate by turns.

Because a friend posted that breath-taking waterscape, and the caption on it ran  something like "Let your life be like flowing water, stagnant waters smell." And because I have been, um, slightly challenged in the smelling department for a long time now : )