How a Day Is Spent

Everything’s easier when you’re home
you just have to wake up
at your dictated time, scroll through
blocks (with fancy fonts) of notifications
popping with feisty incidents of the world.
You shut out, a click of the power button.

While at home, with the gold of the sun
lying on the two houses in my window
or the passing stories of the townspeople on the road
or the occasional jokes or a proud line
of paperbacks with their edges matching
never, neither by colour nor size nor geography
or the episodes of a webseries on the device or
chatting with fam or the transparent
tub-like tea mug and Britannia biscuits
with a tea cup and blond wheat leaves
engraved on them.

In the bubble of a sanctuary
a new bird, satiate, chest swelled, with parents,
its world in the permissible circumference
of the eyes’ perception.
The horizon of truth not coming
knocking at its face.

Yet housed/nested steals the thrill,
the intrepid west, the lying below
the blue-black sky on unknown greens,
the nights out and OOTDs, the candids
and car rides producing a poet’s memories.
While the body obeys its impotence
the mind exhumes treasures at home.

Anam Tariq holds an M.A. in English. Her poems have appeared in poetry anthologies, The Punch Magazine, New Reader Magazine, Spill Words, The Alipore Post, LiveWire and elsewhere. A Leaf upon a Book (2022) is her poetry collection.

Featured image: RITIK GUPTA/Unsplash