My Window View Poem by Ishan Chaitanya

As I look out my window
I see a familiar landscape
That has been my waking view
Every morning of these twenty years.

This picture is no poetry in motion:
It's like a fixed destiny of the area,
The clustered factories right across
A polluted and shallow riverbed;

And a little farther to the Northeast
A similar pattern continues,
Batches of brown and grey buildings
Stretching widely across town,

It almost seems like a backdrop
For a petty, depressing movie
That those who are selling pie in the sky
Had once thrown out their plane window.

No trees by the river; I wonder
If this was their original plan,
Or was it simply fashioned as all
The rest - to curtail our freedom

Of having options - to daydream gazing
Out the window or walk by the river
Unharmed by the scorching sun
Or suffocated by the surrounding smog.

Yes, this indeed is not the type
Of landscape that poets have described
In centuries of sweet words,
Those blandishers of pretty pictures.

Yet walking in hope by the garbage heaps
And chimneys that scrape the clouds
In the hood, I relentlessly dream on
Of a very distant, brave new place.