Pouring Out Poem by Daniel Trevelyn Joseph

Every girl I see makes me happy
To see her. I enjoy the looks,
The colour, the shape, the waist,
The breasts, the eyes, the voice,
The modulations, the movements,
The glances, the steps, the dress,
Upper lower, the jewellery in the ears,
Particularly in the nose, on the neck,
In short, everything about a young girl.

In fact I don’t remember noticing girls
When I was young, or a teenager;
In middle age, I was attracted
Only by women who were nice to me,
It was the behaviour and not the looks.
Now in declining old age,
I find myself magnetized,
When a girl swims into my ken,
I stand transfixed metaphorically
Completely lost, yielding myself -
Not to anything bad, no imaginings
Or mental undressings,
But just the beauty of youth,
Its shape and the female mystery.

What Yeats sang about lust and rage
Holding him busy in old age,
Cannot but turns out to be true for me, too.

I don’t go after them,
I don’t keep thinking about them,
I am happy when I see them,
I appreciate the beauty of girls.

This is especially so when I am
Away from home into regions
Where girls are fair and different,
Like in Srinagar, or now in Tawang,
In eastern Arunachal Pradesh in India.

Today there was a family in the helicopter,
The woman looked dignified if not aristocratic,
But the man was in monk’s robe, the marrying kind,
There was a proud young daughter
Who held her head high and haughty first,
But during the course of an hour’s flight
Kept turning in our direction, assessing.
Maybe she was only looking beyond us
To the window on this side of the craft
Showing scenery of Eastern Himalayas.

Today’s generation of girls
Are a tribe whose inner self
Is not known to me in any case.
What she goes through, what she does,
Or want, I don’t know, I wonder
Whether any one who is older
Even by three or four years really
Understands or shares anything
Especially nonmaterial thoughts
With them, I wonder.

Be that as it may, the colours they wear,
Send my heart and eyes tingling,
When they match colours
With different parts
Of their lissom bodies
And further with gems and gold
Spread all over themselves,
And when they tinkle by, and invade me
With their perfumed bodily presence,
I confess I am all aflutter with life.