Reflection

Reflection

This poem lunges into the deepest abyss of my childhood memories. I have linked my understanding of climate change and interweaved with a loss. A loss of a dear friend. Who I never really met again. She a year younger than me, quick witted and unbearingly happy all the time. She used to laugh a lot. And make me smile on the coldest days. In a blink, she was gone. I never really knew where. I live in a (former hill station) metropolitan city in India called Pune. It used to pleasant and pink in the hottest months. Listening to cuckoos' symphonies, strolling in the pulchritudinous woods, hiking on the steepest plateaus, the tantalizing smell of wet mud was life. But as urbanization accelerated, a lot new factories were set up near the fresh-water lakes. Trees were cut as the IT sector advanced into a new tomorrow. With so many fresh opportunities, every single graduate's dream became our IT parks. And with that came the inevitable side-effects of congestion and over-population. Nobody realized when the parks and woods became wastelands and factories. And now here I am, with temperatures exceeding 41 degree celsius almost every day during peak summer. As I sat down one blissfully cool nights, brainstorming about what I wanted to write a poem on, she came to mind. Her brown eyes, reminding me of muddy and infiltrated lakes. Her coarse hands reminding me of the dessicated fields. I drew a lot of comparison between the climate change and the memory of what my friend was like. It was the pure ecstasy of bittersweet nostalgia that embroidered the the words on my blank page. I want my poem to trigger something in reader's unknown cores. A warning towards the increasing temperatures and how we choose to consciously ignore it under the name of industrialization and progress.