L'esprit de l'escalier

Photo by  Jeffrey Czum  from  Pexels The Matchbox House  By Swadha Rawat   Struck a match Or in this case, well more than a few: A bubbling vat of oil, a hunk of smouldering charcoal and Another shovelful of hard, dark coal fuel. Covered your ears, breathed in the smoke: Wispy strands and dissipating tendrils caressing your hair.   Set a clock, and forgot, that it was ever there. A decade, two, three and four Then struck it with a baseball bat when the buzzing alarm wouldn’t stop. Eyes still closed, In a slowly warming up room: stifling, festering, irrevocably altering. The ice starts dripping down, pooling round the refrigerator But the taps run dry, coated with a fine layer of corrosive acid. (Entire biomes lost, entire species gone, entire livelihoods lost to the seemingly inevitable crawl of time.)   It was not inevitable, it could be stopped But still the man in the room lies, half asleep, deaf to his own wheezes,...

The Reaper   by Swadha Rawat Co -First Place Winning Piece at the 2019 Writer's Guild, Modern School Flash Writing Contest for Grade 10   Photo by Anete Lusina from Pexels   Even as the drums of war reverberated in the caged city,  A shroud of mourning muting the fallen kingdom, The Black Market glistened With precious swords and stolen stones The tinkle of golden bangles on slender wrists and golden coins trading hands. In the tangled web of crooked alleys Awaited a wizened old woman Whose eyes shone in the dark with the wisdom of a thousand suns. The newly crowned invaders swarmed the market Dark hands covered in blood reaching for even more After burning their lore and crushing their defeated souls. The Red Knight General of the conqueror’s force Swept into an alley in his bloodred cloak And looked down upon A crippled, wizen woman with a headband of beaten gold His gloved hand snatched the glittering circlet away. Her yellow teet...

Modern Day Superheroes By Swadha Rawat   Photo by  Anna Shvets  from  Pexels Our generation Grew up watching Superman take flight over film reel And flipping the worn pages of Iron Man comics. Hearing cries of “Avengers Assemble” And dreaming of bat mobiles that rumbled through smoky streets. Recalling tales of super human legends: Of Hercules’s Labours that numbered twelve And Vishnu’s popular incarnations that ten times here dwelled. Today, though People are piled up in hospitals Coughing fits, and shivers, Ventilators, blankets and bodies clutter the halls. You and I, most likely, Are sequestered in our homes, hands slathered with sanitizer And watching the tally on our phones. On the frontlines, today, There dwell, modern day, real superheroes More alive than any of our books or movies or dusty tales of old. Helping others breath At the expense of their own. In the light bleached corridors and The creaking metal beds of the hospital floor, Beeping monitors and ra...

Narrating Nature By Swadha Rawat    A Short Note on this Poem  5th June is World Environment Day and in this time of reckless consumerism, rampant pollution and strictly online activism, the question looming over us is : what will the environment and nature and all this biodiversity look like for our children? Will it still exist? I'm sixteen and for almost half my life, the go to thing I'd watch was Animal Planet or National Geographic. I grew up watching Bindi the Jungle Girl and on my tenth birthday, instead of celebrating it, I wanted to go to an animal sanctuary and see what tigers looked like out in the wild, not through a screen.  I could go to Ranthambore National Park and see nature but can the next generation, or the one after that? The Convention on Biological Diversity concluded that up to 150 species are lost everyday. Yes, even today. Even on World Environment Day. The reality is bleak. Our water is polluted, our air unbreathable, our forests are ...

In Between Couch Cushions By Swadha Rawat   Photo taken by Lisa Fotios @ pexels.com A short note on how this poem came to be  I don’t think I've written on such a random topic before. The story behind this is that, quite simply put, I had writers block. I kept on sitting in front of my laptop for hours and hours but never made it past the first few lines of any project before deleting everything I'd written. Frustrated, I ended up googling "poem prompts" and looked for the silliest one I could find. The one that inspired this poem, as you may have guessed, was along the lines of 'you've lost something in the gap between your couch'. This poem is all about discovering things in the most unexpected places and not really realising you've lost something until it's found again. I think as a teenager, I feel myself changing so much over the years but often when someone's changing, they're discarding something and as I've tried to draw c...

Trusting Eyes…What did I do Wrong? Written 23 rd  October 2016 By Swadha Rawat, aged 12 Published in Modern School Biennial Sandesh   The car horn bellowed, you whistled for me. I bounded out with trusting eyes, but you looked so forlorn. Oh what! Oh what! Did I do wrong? "Walkies", you said it like it wasn’t a treat. I wagged my tail I trust you, you could never do any wrong. What’s this? You left the kids at home? But I thought they loved me… I love them… I love you. So I didn’t worry, I looked at you with trusting eyes But you looked so angry. Oh what! Oh what! Did I do wrong? As I sat in the car, we turned on an unfamiliar road "This isn’t the way to the park!" I barked. You didn’t say anything as we pulled onto the curb. You tugged me out, I wagged my tail, you could never do any wrong. You pulled me past hundreds of dogs; Unloved…Unwanted…Alone My tail went in, my head was down, I look...

How do you Feel? A Project By Swadha Rawat A little background on the project and poem From the 11th of May 2020 to the 16th of May 2020, I participated in a Psychology Summer Internship with Dr Samir Parikh, organised by Fortis Hospital. An important part of the internship was the Social Media Project I had to make. Now, I was honestly quite perplexed about what to do. I've always been a firm advocate of the importance of mental health, but I had never expressed my opinions to a platform larger than that of my school magazine. I ended up writing a poem. But there was still something missing. The message seemed almost disjointed and clinical on paper. That was when I realised that what I was missing was the emphatic, humanistic approach. I guess it was almost a flash of inspiration. Suddenly, it was all I could think of.  This  is how I wanted to make an impact, a multimedia project. In a flurry, I texted my classmates and the respo...