When the Sky Forgot My Name
West Delhi, India
2025, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
There was a time the sky knew me.
It leaned low over paddy fields,
cupped my face in monsoon hands,
and wove clouds into my hair
like a mother with nowhere to be.
The trees did not just grow.
They leaned in. They listened.
The wind waited,
as if the world had all the time
to speak softly.
And the earth beneath my feet
was not just ground.
It was a story.
It was a memory.
It was mine.
I pressed my ear to the soil
and heard the breath of something ancient.
I called it home.
It had no roof,
only roots and rivers,
and the quiet hush of things too sacred
to ever ask for names.
Then came the city.
The sky was folded into glass,
cut into pieces between buildings.
Birds became strangers.
Leaves fell like forgotten poems
no one stopped to read.
The earth sank
under traffic and towers and ticking clocks.
I ask myself sometimes,
Did we leave the land
or did we leave ourselves?
I miss the silence that spoke to me.
Not the silence of nothingness,
but the kind where everything lived
so fully,
it did not need to shout.
Even now,
when no one is looking,
I walk barefoot on patchy grass.
I whisper sorry
to the old tree by the road
whose roots choke under cement.
I close my eyes
and the forest inside me
opens.
It never left.
It never will.
Because I am not made of wires and walls.
I am shaped by rain that touches without taking.
By deserts that remember.
By green that knows my name.
And maybe that is enough.
Maybe
if we all remembered
what it felt like
to be held by the wind,
to be sung to by light,
to be taught by birds instead of books,
the earth would speak again.
And we would finally listen.
Not as strangers,
but as children
coming home.
Reflection
Reflection
Writing this poem felt like returning home. Not to a place made of bricks and lights, but to something older, something I felt in my chest as a child but never had words for. I'm from a Rajasthani family, but I was born in Assam, where the world feels soft and green, where rain is not an interruption but a language. Now, I live in Delhi, a city full of movement, ambition, and cement. Sometimes I feel like I have lost something here, not outside me, but within. When I first read the theme “Connections to Nature: Looking Inside, Going Outside”, it stirred something quiet in me. I sat down to write, not with a plan, but with memories. I remembered the smell of wet earth. I remembered walking barefoot. I remembered how the trees once felt like they knew me. As the poem came together, I realized I was not writing about nature as something separate. I was writing about a version of myself that still exists, even if cities try to bury it. This piece became a kind of personal rediscovery, a way of asking myself, what happens when we forget the language of the sky, and what if that language is still somewhere inside us? Through this process, I have understood that nature is not just about forests and rivers. It is about belonging to something greater, older, and infinitely more tender. I chose poetry because it breathes. It holds emotion without explanation. And with this poem, I wanted to create something that does not simply speak to the reader, but sits beside them quietly and honestly, and reminds them of a time when they, too, felt known by the world.