Weightless, she rode the clouds floating over oceans,

Snow-covered mountains, fields green and brown,

scraggly human habitations, serpentine rivers, and silvery streams

She rode the wispy ones in cold blue skies,

and the dark thunderous monsoon battleships,

firing lightening salvos, drenching the ground underneath.

She had watched them float unhindered,

across hostile borders and nations,

shape-shifting creatures hiding in a sea of white

From her little border village in the desert,

and then a coffin-sized space on a pavement,

in a forgotten corner of a dusty amoebic city.

And, once, dreamed of looking out from an aircraft window,  

bewitched by the endless blanket of clouds ringed blue,

all of eighty now, she finally rode the clouds

Floating over ripening fields, and hills of garbage next to glitzy cities,

it is the way humankind lives she grumbled out aloud,

with no one to heed, felt unchained – freedom unbound.

Cries of excitement ascending from children playing football in a village ground,

made her bank and turn around,   

next to the to-and-fro frenetic Hungama, grazed oblivious cows intent,

Did the green-sprouting laterite surroundings embody

earth’s relentless, misplaced hope? she wondered,

as she flew low over mediaeval castles of yore.

The wavy emerald meadows of Switzerland appeared,

the mighty Himalayas – jagged ridges and glaciers,

the endless lonely steppes and the frozen tundra north

The Sahara, the teeming Savannah, Cape of Hope

she smiled as the red tiles of Florence passed slowly by

and savoured the freshly baked bread and wine from the aroma below.

Having seen it all she thought of passing over,

the thatched huts of her village to revisit a nostalgic time,

a hiraeth, before she moved on to another world

But then the little girl on the pavement tugged her mind,

Jaya, who would be utterly lonely and lost so left behind,

and so, the weight of a kindred sorrow weighed her down.

Willy-nilly she gravitated toward her wretched pavement spot

and slipped back unseen into her cold, scruffy lot

reflexively patting the little girl by her side,

She thought of the bridge over Vltava lighted in the night

the little child in her sleep, stirred

sharing in her wandering mind, and held her hand ever so tight.

***