Pelling: A Fragment Poem by 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
Were 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.