Two Poems by Afzal Moolla

Without you

worn down, weary,
staggering into tomorrow,
dissolving my todays, grim, dreary,

I crawl, slipping out of my skin,
flinging laughter, joy, contentment,
into the gaping abyss of life's dustbin.

Without you.

The Sound of Distant Ankle Bells

Memories of those delicate tinkling bells,

casually fastened around calloused feet,

take hold of my waking moments,

and fling my thoughts back to a distant time,

where folk-songs were heartily sung,
joyful, yet hopelessly out of rhyme.

I barely saw her, a construction labourer perhaps,

hauling bricks, cement, anything, on a scorching Delhi day,
while in the semi-shade of a Gulmohar tree, her infant silently lay.

A cacophony of thoughts such as these swirl around,

yanking me away from the now, to my cow-dung littered childhood playground.

Now, a lifetime of displacement has hushed the jangling chorus of the past,

to a faint trickle of sounds, as distant as an ocean heard inside tiny sea-shells,

and,

I know, that the orchestral nostalgic crescendo, rises, dips, and swells,

as tantalisingly near, yet a world of time away, as were the tinkling of her ankle-bells.

Afzal Moolla was born to exiled South African parents engaged in the struggle against

Apartheid in South Africa.  He currently lives and works in Johannesburg.