Moon at Half Past Noon

We were two weeds within the alley’s grate,
sprung from the crack where sun and concrete meet.
Your voice, the lather from the common spout,
mine, the dry rustle of the neem tree’s doubt.
Our world was measured out in bucket-runs,
the scented heat of freshly baked pav buns.
No one inquired of root or seed,
two common and unquestioned weeds.

Then, the city bloomed—a steel-rose, vast and stark.
We took a room where all the past
was filtered through an AC’s silent hum.
The metro’s tunnel became our new river path,
its roar, the wind that our new seasons knew.
Love was a fluorescent light, sudden and blue,
in the elevator’s silent, climbing womb.
We built our nest within the service-stair’s gloom,
beneath the flyover’s concrete, blooming shade,
while questions of our “soil” were bribed to rest.

But echoes from the alley learned our number,
clung to the “yours and mine” upon the lease.
They called it fever, not a sweet release,
a dialect from a district of the poor.
We felt the weight of that unopened door,
the weary wish to simply walk away,
and end the trouble of the day.
But we struck a match against the coming night,
a reckless, beautiful, and final light.
We thought our want could make the planets bend,
that our two weeds could crack the world, and mend.

But oh, the quiet language of a room
where two dreams wither, and no sun can bloom.
Your heart became a spreadsheet, cell by cell,
mine, an unread poem in a dried-up well.
The landlord’s form, a cold and permanent frost,
the shared, small kitchen—all warmth lost.
The static of the world, a rising tide
that taught us how to step and stand aside.

Now, silence does not creep; it is the air.
A mountain of things we no longer share.
Your leaving was the turning of a key.
Alone, on this new coast of industry,
I watch the artificial fountains play
and search the plastic bloom, the stones of grey,
for one true seed that slipped away.