The Apple Trees Left Behind Poem by Pankhuri Sinha

The Apple Trees Left behind

Its not a one man show
Its not a one time thing
This insistence
That something being shown to me
Must be seen
Its the passing of a key
These days
From one hand to another
Brought right infront of my eyes
Infront of my face
Underneath my nose
Just before i make a purchase
Or ask about it
Little things
Grocery items
Food, mostly
You see
I am recovering from a long digestive illness
And have a lot of anger still in my blood stream
To deal with and throw out
I am trying to cool down
And work my iron levels
The infusion injections were painful
And were made more so
And among the things
Being shown to me
Are apples
In a plastic bag
I don't know if this has to do
With iron levels
Or with the fact
That i did some apple picking
Outside of orchards
And worse
Wrote about it
And sent it in decent envelopes and beautiful handwriting
That i was reduced to stealing
And this is not one of those
Shop lifting syndromes
That refugees exhibited in Canadian superstores
I mostly competed with rabbits
In the picking of apples
And considered it apple swapping
From the tree
That was in front of my apartment
When i had first arrived
On the continent
But all of this had been sealed
In envelopes and sent
Oh my god
Why is this man
Standing with a plastic bag
Full of apples
In front of my eyes
Caused me to throw one
On the floor
From the fruit basket
In my house
The ones my father had bought
They have stopped it now
Now its an opaque
Bag
A jhola
They call it in hindi
And when i don't want to see it
They come very close
And lift it
And dangle it
And make sure
Its in my eyesight
Like amputee beggars
Do
There is a story about the Jhola
And about the time
It suddenly arrived in my life
On campus
And just doesn't leave
And then
There are the two jackets
The brown and the black jackets
No, this is not a detective story
But such eerie crossing of path
By people infront of me
They come so close
Like they will bang into me
And they smell of my ex-husabnd's message
But this is somebody else
But he had said
I will never cross
Your path again
But who is this person?
Who precisely is the Jhola wala?
And the many others
Who make up
The noise
The horrible
Sharp, shrill noise around me?


- - - - - -Pankhuri Sinha