Author: Reena Saxena

आग में जलता हूँ तेरी मैं
आकर तू भी देख तमाशा १।

आंसू भी अब सूख चुके हैं
समझी न तूने उनकी भाषा।२।

नम न कर तू आंखें अपनी
मत दे मुझे नयी कोई आशा।३।

हीरा था अब टूट चूका हूँ
हाय यह कैसा तूने तराशा।४।

काश तुझे बता पाता अमित
करता हूँ तुझे प्यार बेतहाशा।५।

In response to:Reena’s Exploration Challenge #Week 51

You ask me who I am,
this fool whose home-made skin
once glistened
with a million shades
of fake and real, incorporating
all the human I hungered to be
and wished to be envisaged in me;
this fool who
from a distance, glowed,
yet seen up close,
singed the eye.

You ask me who I am;
this woman so deeply seared
by uncertainty.
I can tell you I erred,
and that in erring,
I learned to learn,
crawling toward the cure
as each vain expectation,
each flaking fantasy,
each false pretence
was slaked away,
leaving me both less and more.

You ask me who I am
as I watch my multi-coloured dream-coat
shrink to flickering embers,
surrendered by my own hand
to the questing flames
of questioned truth.

You ask me who I am;
I’ll tell you what I know.
Old flesh shows through the vest
my mother dressed me…

Man is so made that when anything fires his soul, impossibilities vanish.

During my working career, I was confronted as many teachers were, with finding ways to engage our students.

During a ten-year period in a very working-class part of town, my fellow teachers and I staged a number of musical programs to stimulate and engage our students.

I was fortunate to have an excellent drama teacher to work with in the late 1980s.

In 1987 we performed a musical I had written when teaching at a bush school and it went well. In 1989 we decided to get ambitious and write a new show that would explore a range of emotions and scenarios. Doing a show each year had become the expectation within the school and writing a show from scratch was considered ambitious, to say the least, considering our musical ability was somewhat limited.

But we were never…