BY MESAK TAKHELMAYUM
I look at my young mother,
helpless atop a house under construction amidst the flood, past.
Lamphelpat* is the city’s device that can turn back time when it finds its old forms.
A wreckless thirdwheeler of a triangular country.
The stranded sound of her gaze is a heron’s sorrow, leeches stuck on to her crimson legs.
The actual river- far away, bleeding unto its own hyacinth bullets snuffing it.
I am across the veil, my mother; 3decades later - 3days inside my room
I am starving my eyes having never felt the flood of the present, knowing even a freckle must have a name.
You are there, in that space tucked within the concussion of Imphal’s 2 profound rivers.
You witnessed the unbecoming of land as you wondered where you would run to in your namelessness.
Boats would find you only if your tongue fit into them.
So, you stretched your accent in the silence knowing floodwaters have found you.
“Can you make of the water, a son?”, you thought of this as a song.
Your audience? The rusting clouds right before us that sigh,
And then die for love.
I am on that secret mound of longing, wanting to hold your hand- 3 lifetimes ago, a lake.
As yearning is undone before the stilts, lover-like rivers meet again at the keithels* when they break free.
Their passion is embroiled in the sadness of retreating waters.
Their colours, the memory of our skins at my birth.
You and I— 30 years across feelings, are unable to find ‘time’.
When will we meet again?
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*-Lamphelpat is a wetland in Imphal of historical significance/ In recent times it was a prominent locality of Kuki-Zomi-Hmars before the conflict.
*-Meitei lon for market/bazaar