Read Poem: Half a Willow, by Animesh Anand

I saw a willow in a forest forlorn
A half-cleaved out elegance,
yet another thriving mourns
A feller snatched its scions away
Its faunas seized in doom
The leaves that knew nothing of rue
But the flowers need not learn to bloom

The feller who once a commandeer
Lost his half to a hungry bear
He limped his days through starving wild
And ceded his lot for a wife and a child

The wife who cared for their coup
She made their beds, warm loaves and soup
And yes, she seldom knew to read
Yet trained her cub for humble deeds
In a war that’s due behold your mind
The triumph is his whose heart is kind
Reciting lores all sooth and sly
She held her love a rock-a-bye

The child half blind had an emerald half
His heart twice as large he made the seasons laugh
‘Is true he couldn’t reckon the path to his stay
Yet never ceased to unsee the elegant willow’s way

His willow of grace whose scions cleaved
Its faunas snatched the Aves grieved
And leaves that breath all mortals’ blow
The leaves that knew nothing but to grow
I saw its vines in a foreign land
They whispered gently, “We Understand!”
And they do, I assure you, that is for sure,
Can’t quarrel in words they chose the birds
To chirp to cry for them they fly
And back to board the humble abode
They keep a track of bright and black
All meek and sly and the passersby
Some halt and lay unto umbra bay
And quench its thirst for strange novelettes
More carry the dreads of towering threads
Troubling to reach out lost spirits, muddle-heads
Serenely sinews dangling down
Unstained by the talking town
Yet he who greet the bleeding sun
Can feel the bliss of unison.
– Animesh Anand