News from Nowhere IV

You know, I left my raincoat on the hook

because I wouldn’t need it on the road –

three hundred suns per year, promises made good,

and at a pinch the sheet wrapped like a cloak.

Does it hang there still? Do you sometimes look

in passing in its pockets for a note?

a memory? - perhaps remnants of some mute,

faded smells of rain and cigarette smoke.

It drizzled here today but it was brief.

I went walking without a waterproof –

the rain was like your fingers on my face.

But all rain feels the same in every place,

wherever I go, however far I move –

some strange fluttering bliss akin to grief.

Well, V-Day has come and gone, and as in most other years, I'm continuing with my own version of love poems to mark the month. Because love is kind of an everyday thing around here, in addition to being a many splendoured thing of course.  Love is the dressing in life's salad bowl, it holds the salad together, makes the greens glisten and adds the zing, but you don't really talk about it much. It's made everyday without a fixed recipe, which was really a list of ingredients scribbled down somewhere on the stub of a ticket or something. Gone missing for years now, but it doesn't matter because it's a conditioned reflex anyways, if you know what I mean. 

On a more sombre note, the news out of India was terrible on the 14th, 44 jawans killed in the most atrocious and audacious suicide bomb attack in Kashmir. Or maybe not so audacious, given that we never seem to learn anything from our mistakes. Not one single thing! Terrorists can storm our parliament, besiege an entire Indian city, massacre security personnel at our border posts at will, kill dozens of them on the most heavily guarded road. Just like that. It turns my brain inside out to even think of it. 

Respect and thoughts for the soldiers and their families.