Poem of the Day
Yellow Striped Pajamas
By Shamsher Bahadur Singh
walking silently on his paws, he emerges from the semidarkness and disappears into it.
walking silently on his paws, he emerges from the semidarkness and disappears into it.
At one time, under this same title,
I told the whole story of the kidnapped girl
and her Mexican tortures.
I am unmade here, out of habit and thinking is no door.
I’d lick your boots, your breastplate clean, shine your clocks
to come candid: my door is slightly ajar: come inside my
outside, seen by common sense like a collection
She cannot get it to her mouth fast enough. She cannot
stop herself.
What rush correspondence of blood replenishes dangerous
I never kept sheep,
But it’s as if I had.
My soul is like a shepherd,
It knows the wind and the sun
And walks hand in hand with the Seasons,
Following and looking.
All the peace of peopleless Nature
Comes to sit by my side.
But I feel as sad as a sunset is
To our imagination,
When we see it fading in the distance
And feel the night enter
Like a butterfly through the open window.
It’s night. The night is very dark. In a house a long way off
Shines the light from a window.
I see it, and I feel human from head to toe.
It’s odd that the whole life of the person who lives there, and who I don’t know,
Draws me in simply because of that distant light.
His life is doubtless real, and he has a face, gestures, family, and profession.
Now, though, all that matters to me is the light in his window.
Grubby, unknown child playing at my door,
I don’t ask if you bring me a message full of symbols.
I’m drawn to you because I’ve never seen you before,
And, of course, if you were clean, you’d be a different child,
You wouldn’t even come here.
Play in the dust, go on, play!
He barely looked, so used he had become
to how little pleasure Time could bring,
Does one ever sink into a vision?
He found old age awaiting him
on a spare and limpid plain
between Troy’s embers and the mines’