Just before the countdown could begin, the fireworks’ smoke
already had the city’s lung choking. There in his room upstairs, I saw
my nephew thumbing through the pages of a poetry book. He is
quite geekish at eight; the book, half-wrecked, is two years old.
“Uncle, uncle”, he exclaimed. “Don’t you have a New Year poem?”
“I have of course, it isn’t there,” I quipped.
The year has turned, he kept insisting: “Uncle, uncle, show me one!”
As if a New Year poem is something like a coke-cum-mentos bomb,
or something as spectacular as anti-gravity. But still, any poem
is better than levitation. And so on his palm I wrote the URL of
an old, abandoned blog of mine. “Do a rummage on the archive,
little boy.” I tapped his shoulder gently. Alas, after some thundery,
trumpety minutes he came back and showed me a poem he has just
printed, entitled: ‘Listen to the King’s Dying Words’. “I like this one
uncle, you have such a New Year poem,” he yelled smiling.
I smiled back thinking how in the hell he did get to discern it
and how he learned, at an early age, that a New Year poem
doesn’t necessarily have to be written late December, nor January.
