Abhilash’s poem explores a man’s love for a childhood symbol, highlighting the complexities of human emotion and the passage of time in a glass bowl, exclusively for Different Truths.
How does a man rear
A crystalline minnow fish
In a globular glass bowl
For five decades?
In his mind’s glass bowl?
The sparkling little minnow
Tenderly lifted from the stream,
Fondly caressed, cuddled,
And gazed upon with love.
Concealed in the empty lunch box,
Carried home stealthily,
Unnoticed, with silent steps,
Dripped into the glass bowl.
To swim round and round and round…
In the crystalline world
Of the glistening season of love,
When the seven-colored light
Seeped through the window glass,
The minnow wriggled like
The love-sick mind!
As the rain poured ceaselessl
Like the outpour of angst,
Separation and bereavement,
When I rained alone in my room
In friendless silence,
The minnow fish,
With tearless, glassy eyes,
Swam all the breadth of an ocean.
When the rain at a time
Has washed away the soil beneath my feet,
When my years have flowed away
Leaving behind my unfulfilled dreams
The minnow is there,
Like my gasping soul!
In my globular glass bowl,
There is the same minnow fish!
Like the eternal spring,
My everlasting childhood!
The same minnow!
After fifty-odd years!
The same showers,
The same pathways,
The same memories…
No!
My minnow fish never gets old,
It is locked up in a bowl of time
Like the locked-up water
n a crystalline glass bowl!
Picture Design by Anumita Roy
Abhilash Fraizer is a multi-award-winning, bilingual Indian author hailing from Kerala. His latest book ‘Father, a collection of Poems’ published in Oregon USA, won the USA and Canada Catholic Media Association Book Award, in June 2024. He also won the Panorama International Literature Special Jury Award for his remarkable literary contributions. His other major works in English include, ‘The End of Wars’, (a novel) and ‘Everlasting Things are Incomplete’, (an anthology of poems).
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