General

Of companionship,

Of hurt,

Of hunger,

Of territorial brawls,

The birds sing a song,

I pretend to understand their lyrics,

Each and every time,

Of sharing,

Of weather changes,

Of reliability,

Of longevity,

The trees rustle up in unison,

I pretend to understand their music,

Each and every time,

Of a tear’s worth,

Of fear’s fury,

Of their silent pain,

Of uncountable miseries,

An unknown person’s untold concern,

I pretend to understand,

Each and every time,

I could only hear the loud noise,

I could only see the anger,

I cared less for their pain,

I shrugged past their concerns,

My kith and kin’s pain,

I discounted as an endless ramble,

Each and every time.

115 words.

Acknowledgements :- Thank you Reena Ma’am for running the Reena’s Exploration Challenge #135. For rules please refer here. Thank you all for stopping by and reading.

Reena is the host of Reena’s Exploration Challenge.

PROMPT #135

~*~

Listening is a lost art

People may hear you but few really listen

They hear what they want to hear

Their minds already forming the replies

Answers they would give without listening, without understanding

You fall silent

Thinking that it is useless

Words are not heeded

Tones or inflections of speech make no difference

Those who are engrossed in their own lives

Have no time to listen to you,

No matter who you are or what your thoughts are

#Keepitalive

#ReenasExplorationChallenge

“Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear,” by Vincent VanGogh

I’m about halfway through Chuck Palahniuk’s new book, “Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life After Which Everything was Different,” and the prompt phrase today reminds me of something Chuck says in it. In the section, Establishing Authority: Your Storytelling Context, he says,

Context and source are more important now than they’ve ever been. So if you were my student, I’d ask you, “Who’s telling this? Where are they telling it? And why are they telling it?”
Palahniuk, Chuck. Consider This (p. 40). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.

There is no way to separate the writer from the story. It would be akin to looking at the self-portrait by VanGogh where he is missing his ear and not wondering what the story behind it was.

Everyone is selling something. In the writer’s case, it is a personalized point of view. If…

Some days I shun news

(like the plague or should I say covid 19 now)

on others, I am a news junkie

zombie like watching the flickering screen

letting the incessant babble attack me from all sides

getting teary-eyed and raging by turns

being a willing puppet

to the machinations of paid media

carried away by the insincere rhetoric

And yet there are days

when I watch the daily tamasha* for amusement

like a bystander

same information disseminated differently

by those who support the official policies and the opposition

the righteous table thumping and fist pumping

criticism cutting to the quick

and conveniently legacy issues raised

it is a challenge to separate the truth from the gobbledygook

no one really bothered about the real affairs

scoring points, projecting concerned persona

more pronounced now than ever

my amusement turns to distaste

when the unfolding tragedy of migrants

fails to stir anyone…

Days, not so long ago,

Trip to the hills on the cards,

A hilltop cottage,

Promising sightings of wildlife,

Was earmarked,

Images of tigers, leopards on their night time prowl,

Waiting to be sighted by us conjured,

Us, equipped with torchlights,

With coffee mugs by the side,

Ready to sacrifice sleep and spot,

Alas! The mighty cats chose a different route that day,

It wasn’t our lucky night,

But, as the saying goes,

Patience always pays,

We weren’t to be disappointed by a herd of deers,

Who chose the early hours of dawn,

To pay a visit to the riverbank,

Our wildlife spotting wasn’t to go in vain,

If not for the mighty cats, the humble deers graced the occasion.

120 words.

Backstory :- This poem is based on our experience on a visit to B.R Hills, Karnataka, India, last year. We had booked a…

We talk of communing with Nature, but ’tis with ourselves we commune… Nature furnishes the conditions – the solitude – and the soul furnishes the entertainment.

John Burrough

A lonely, broken down house sat at the edge of the woods, its windows boarded, its roof partially exposed to the elements, its occupants roosting in the rafters or hiding in secret holes bored into the walls. The house could feel the ghosts of past occupants still wandering its hallways.

It wasn’t always so. Seventy years ago a stranger came to the woods, felled trees and lovingly constructed the house with hard work and fine craftsmanship. He had married, raised a family, made the house a loving comfortable home and took care of its every need for decades. But time moves on, as did the children, and when the parents died the house…