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.