Moon at Half Past Noon

We knew the stories then,
the ones hung with pins of light.
The city dreamt in kerosene hum,
in streetlamp halos, soft and low.
We gathered where the phool wali gali
let fall its scent of night-queen,
where the only screens were passing lives
in rickshaws’ curtained glow.

The air was thick with promise, not yet dust.
Gossip spun on terraces of tea,
the radio’s faint, golden filament
threading a tune
through the neem tree.
Above, a flung handful of diamond rett—
a sky you could address by name.
My grandfather’s finger, tracing a path
from the cold kettle to the scorpion’s tail.
We knew our place by that.

The day’s last paper battles done,
the kites asleep in their strings,
we walked beneath a borrowed sun—
the moon, our steady, silver lens.
It turned the auto’s rattle into rhythm,
the train whistle into a lonely beat.
We did not know we were memorizing a heaven,
learning the night by heart,
by raw, unwritten law.

Now, the sky is a simmering copper,
a permanent dusk. Our constellations
are private, drawn in the ghost of breath
on a midnight bus window:
your initial, a heart, a clumsy star.

We make new maps.
I navigate by the neon’s flicker
arc-ing your sleeping face.
Our satellite is the ping of your message:
Look. A planet. Above the water tank.
And I look—not up, but into my hand,
at your tiny, glowing proof.

We are astronomers of the close.
I chart the galaxy of your freckles,
the eclipse of your lids when you laugh,
the slow orbit of your breath beside me.
The great dark has come down to dwell
in the millimetre of charged air
between our hands, before they touch.

And when we drive beyond the last
stubborn glow of the world,
and stand knee-deep in the shocking cold river
of the real Milky Way,
we are silent.
Not from forgetting the old names,
but because we have brought our own light.
It hums between us—a warm, local star.

We have not lost the sky.
We have folded it into a smaller, brighter logic.
We carry it now, a shared and pocketable dark,
a love that learned to see in the glow.