Breathing Spaces

A road
From my heart
Curls back to a village
Where an old peepul tree
Stands guard
Against the termites of time
In broad daylight
Shades a sun-tanned child
And at night
Ghosts of memory
Dance in the hollow
A canopy stretched over a broken well
Cloying intensity of a mother’s love
Sometimes oozing
Sometimes dripping
Sometimes flowing
Into an onward stream
Rushes thro’ the green fields
Well bounded
By a red brick wall
Flushed with the anger
Of a stern father
I could not stay rooted
Like the peepul tree
And moved away
Leaving the green fields behind
The red brick wall
A mere stain on my conscience
But I carried
A little garden in my heart
Where a white rose blooms
By midnight
When breathing spaces die
On the edge of my gas chamber.