House-Broken Sparrow Poem by Seema joglekar

HOUSE-BROKEN SPARROW
Twitter twitter tweet,
Life on the off-beat,
Sparrow shuddering in all seasons,
Bundled like a dropp or a blister of pain for no reason.

Spawns in home’s for human warmth,
With tiny leftovers of someone else’s mirth,
While it’s country cousin flies in the opposite direction
In search of another higher hearth.

Bawling their daily needs of socks, groceries& milk bottles,
Screaming platitudes for shunning chores, in trees.

Twitter twitter tweet,
For a crumb of bread or a grain of wheat
An inch off a ledge can suffice for yesterday’s sour things &today’s house-warming,
Witness to broken homes, neglected porches, overflowing taps, faulty plumbing,
The man of the house in this century has gone missing,
While the kids await manhood with his picture in fine dressing.

Here the sparrow brings forth its young,
Its entire brood presides over the reality T.V spun,
In the drawing room played out from tear-dripping ceiling, learn.

Twitter twitter tweet,
But when one chick loses balance, shoved by a brother,
For a better morsel or in the custom of sibling rivalry,
In midst of a twittering choir,
Falls down from high-rise &lands on the floor.

Those fatherless kids pick it up to father it, the scourge is prod den,
The sparrow wouldn’t touch the fallen young,
Wary that the jinx of resident evil has befallen.
But would prefer to sit on its high perch,
And in tearless eyes call,
Twitter twitter tweet

X----x----X


29September2009