For Him..

But to my ears they will come before
to wear down the tour
of the sweet and hard love which binds us,
and they will say: “The one
you love,
is not a woman for you,
Why do you love her? I think
you could find one more beautiful,
more serious, more deep,
more other, you understand me, look how she’s light,
and what a head she has,
and look at how she dresses,
and etcetera and etcetera”.

And I in these lines say:
Like this I want you, love,
love, Like this I love you,
as you dress
and how your hair lifts up
and how your mouth smiles,
light as the water
of the spring upon the pure stones,
Like this I love you, beloved.

And because Love battles
Pablo Neruda

cotton tree

The place I grew up in had been built by the British sometime in the 1800s.. It was a very clean, well organized, uncluttered colony, with green fields everywhere.. Groups of children would throng these fields in the evenings, tiring themselves with a whole assortment of games. The field beside our residential quarter had a cotton tree in the middle. It shed its leaves once a year, growing cotton in one season and red, heavy, rubbery-petalled flowers in another.. This tree would often form the cynosure of most of our childish games.. There was a concrete tub underneath the cotton tree. Only God knows what its use was. It had probably meant something to our colonizers.. For us, however, this tub was of miscellaneous use.. Very frequently it would be our imagined ‘car’, in which a few of us would bunch ourselves, ‘driving’ ourselves to imaginary places.
One evening at dusk, during one of our games, it was in this tub that I had seen a chameleon for the first time. I had actually stepped on it.. had felt something bristly and rubbery underneath my feet and had looked down to find myself standing on a chameleon. I must have been five or six years old.. After almost 17 years, the memory of the incident is still fresh. It still gives me the creeps everytime I think of it.. There is no need for me to remember it particularly. It wasn’t as if I was much scared then..
I had in fact probably not yet developed my fear of reptiles then.
My life’s first and only encounter with a chameleon. Underneath that cotton tree beside that much loved house. In that place I don’t live any more.