After dinner I hear the music of the ceremony
across the street. I look outside my open window
to the neighbor’s house and watch the procession
slowly move from room to room. The young woman
presses pink pigment to the foreheads of her kneeling
brothers as the mother looks on, smiling, nodding.
I hear babies crying in Konkoni.
The smell of urine sifts up to me
as the breeze shifts the branches of a tree.
A quiet moment in the garden city.
A cow slowly wanders down the muddy road.
Across the field, the crack of the bat
from a cricket game echoes through the window.
The game will soon finish due to darkness.
And I know now, how if night never came,
the game would never end, and the boys
done playing wouldn’t shyly smile at me
through the open window as they peddle home.
Photo by Zoshua Colah on Unsplash
