Father Poem by mohanan viswambharan Nair

Oh, father, my dear father!
Why did you hide your love from us,
like a seed hiding its sapling in it?
How many winters, summers and
rains have come and gone?
The seed of love in you did not sprout out.
In the heavy lightning and thunder,
we gathered under your shelter.
Like a bird's song, it cherished us!
Was it soliciting us,
as a warm breeze up the hill?
Did it caress us like a river,
flowing slow waves?
You were a river flowing, carefully.
A rough river, although it did not devour its bank.
The day, when I was down with fever,
you were running around the room tensed up-
mother told me in your absence.
I can't recall it without rainbow memories.
Sometimes as rough as a rock,
Sometimes, you seemed infallibly like a huge tree,
with no leaves as if in a heavy winter.
To the roughness, I quarrelled many times with you.
It incited me once to find a lodge of a distant friend.
Oh, father, I lay on a mat under his cot for many nights.
My shirts, shoes, socks also became his property,
even so, I was not ready to share with him in return.
On getting bored with me, he took me to the playground,
where, his friends shot the ball at my stomach, running around me
It was a planned game to make me leave his room.
For my mother's rage on my absence, you replied-
‘ He doesn't need to go, is it not my fury for his best? '
I might be elsewhere on the veranda of a shop, you reckoned.
I heard from the mother, your eyes were wet as you let out a long sigh.
Oh, father, I can't recall it without a pang of conscience.
I failed to grasp the value of the tree on running under it,
I know the value of the shade,
years and years after that I became a father.

Mohanan.V. Nair

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