Category Archives: Poetry

I once took a picture of a house on a hill
A house on a hill
A house on a hill
With a red roof and a wooden door
Bright green grass
Like the pictures kids draw

I longed to go back to the house on the hill
The house on the hill
The house on the hill
To remember the trees and flowers
The feelings I felt
In a more naïve hour

At my bedside sat the house on the hill
The house on the hill
The house on the hill
As a door my daydreams could enter through
So that somehow older beliefs
Could be magically renewed

In today’s paper I saw the house on the hill
The house on the hill
The house on the hill
Reconstructed and transformed
Unrecognizable from
The nostalgic world my memories had formed

All that’s left is my picture of the house on the hill
The house on the hill
The house on the hill
Held together by my heart’s frame
My mind’s filter
And the day’s shame

How far can a name travel?
How many new worlds can it see?
Before the changing scents and ever-molding patterns
Change its pronounced identity.

How far can a name travel?
How many worlds can it see?
Before the tugging blood threads from its ancestral home
Start invoking their mythical nostalgic fantasies.

It’s spring time now
And the early morning birds tweet
Songs of optimism and hope
Marching into the dawn with beautiful feet

My store-front window has dated
With winter’s fashion trends
The time of protest, anger and distrust
Seemed to have come to an (un)expected end

Let me dress up my mannequins
With the colours of neighbouring outlets
For my patrons have stopped paying with clicks
Opting for next door’s sonnets

Let me drape its head with quotes
Appropriated from contexts generally unseen
Maybe it will give an appearance nouveau
And get the world to notice me

Let me give its lips a smile and song
Something that may now be hard to do
Because I’d learnt the winter dance and songs so well
And now once again I have to become something new

Yet if I don’t dress it up in seasonal vogue
They may not come inside to see
The apparel sewn by the deepest parts
The doubts and fears and hurts in polychromatic tapestry

But the more my offering changes
To match the song of the birds
The less space left inside the store
To display the original song my heart once heard

The song of freedom and beauty
The melody of glorious things unseen
The secret things that have remained hidden
Because I’ve buried them within

So let me finish dressing my mannequin
To cash in on cryptic social currency
Before it’s time to learn summer’s song
In another escape from social redundancy