Winter woes
There was this exquisite ordinariness
To the morning
Sun playing with children
My winter clothes
Drying for a change
A sort of day
That should ring Sunday church bells
Inside my head
On a Tuesday morning
Before one could process the gratitude
That should have been expressed
Inside a winter’s cold heart
There was thunder
And rain
The sort that is avaricious
Nudging out the patches of blue skies
Between the clouds
A dance of elbows
of fiercely competitive children
On sports ground
One was bereft of the pleasure
Of seeing day turn to night
Sudden and swift was the darkness
The feeling one gets
When loved one hasn’t returned home
On turbulent night
That feeling
Imagining the worst
Except there is
No loved one left
Worry in absentia
I open the drawer
Much lighter things to hold on to
Stationery
From your world tours
Every city visited
Unused note pads
With their combinations
Of untouched pens
Vandana Kumar is a translator, recruitment consultant, cinephile, Indie Film Producer and multiple award-winning poet from New Delhi, India. Her poems have been published in national and international websites and anthologies of repute. She is a Pushcart prize nominee 2023 and her poetry collection ‘Mannequin of Our Times’ has also won several awards. ‘Mannequin Of Our Times’ has recently been translated into Greek by the ‘Writers International Edition’. She received the Global Icon Award at the Global Vision Summit 2025 held in Athens, Greece.
