KHAYAAL

  GREEN GRASS: EVE A girl born in light Brought up in meadows Hardly a care Of the world around Lovingly named Eve Apple of the Eye Her smile so bright  The Sun would shy Nothing was lacking At her little estate Feast tables grand Delicacies of all names Amiss in this fairytale Awry was her heart Filled with curiosity  Of the world dark 13 and she snuck  Away to places dim Perilous one such was A brothel called Ning There she’d seen once A girl so swift In thievery and ruckus As none could guess Infatuated to the brim Followed Ning around did Eve Sometimes tempestuous She sometimes felt glee She longed to forsake The trimmed bouquet of her life And be like this girl Flowering with thorny sides What comes, dear reader When you decide To live alternately Through another’s eyes?  GREEN GRASS: NING A girl born in darkness Of sinful shadows Hardly a care From the world around Given no name She christened herself A’Ning after the brothel She was bred in Living among...

My sister and I have been indulging ourselves into this lately: a game of letters, where we both come up with two words - noun, adjective, verb. We then crisscross our words to come up with semi, or at times, non-coherent phrases. The activity is to explain that phrase with a sentence, a couplet, a paragraph, whatever that first strikes our mind.  One particularly challenging one was 'Serene cheque'. What even?? My sister got 'Stellar realm' and the poem she constructed around it, I was not expecting it the least! The resultant couplet from my end was - satisfactorily mundane.  Amidst the clacking of keys and numbers Shouts of prices and bets on ground The promise to her was sure and complete, A serene cheque you know would never bounce. As I said - satisfactorily mundane. You've got the elements of Show and Tell, and there's a couplet which makes you go, "What promise?"