Moon at Half Past Noon

A satellite dish, a gutted bowl of sky,
sags from a lintel scoured by monsoon.
The rain has its own patience. It fills
the cat’s forgotten saucer to the brim,
then empties it, a ritual for no one.
A poppy’s red fist in the chai-shop hearth.
In the school’s one bell, a paper palace
of wasps. The god’s gaze is polished blank
by the constant green press of the pines.

They traded the vertical life—
the calf-burn of the climb, the terraced hymn
that fed six months of cloud—
for the horizontal strain of the factory line,
the numbered flat of a rented room.
Their mountain now a thumbnail
on a glowing screen, a place to zoom in
and quickly out of. A saved photo:
home. The word gone soft with distance.

The elders are their own archive.
She knows the mildew smell that means
the snow will come in seven days.
He counts, by touch, the medicine strips
in a tin, each pill a silver chip
against the ache. Their harvest
is the money order’s flimsy blue,
the call that comes each Sunday,
its static-filled silence more solid
than the voice that says we’re fine.

Then: not memory, but muscle.
The grate of a saw on rusted iron.
A man whose shoulders know
the architecture of collapse
re-stones the fallen wall. His hammer-fall
a fresh arrhythmia in the valley’s slow heart.
At night, he sleeps beside a bucket
of well-water, a chair lodged hard
under the knob. This safety
is a thing he builds each day,
like fire.

A woman draws from the spring,
her children a tense bouquet behind her.
Watch, she says. The water is so clear
it lies. The bottom is farther
than it seems. She builds a wall
not for a field, but for a practice—
a low, deliberate circle in the dirt,
to learn the grammar of inside.

At the water’s lip, two vessels:
the chipped brass lota, descending first.
The yellow plastic bucket, waiting.
The space between them is the only treaty.
Their eyes do not meet on the surface,
but on the shared, distorted reflection
of the sky. The sharing is a new language,
all noun, no verb.

The mountain’s only logic is gravity.
It offers the same snow to the sagging roof
and the repaired one. The same lichen
to the sacred stone and the broken plough.
On the far plain, the city stitches
its fevered circuit-board of lights.
Here, a new keeper studies the old path,
his breath a brief cloud in the cold air—
not a return, but a profound arrest.

And the wind, through a crack
in a pane they haven’t fixed yet,
moves a single, torn plastic bag
tethered to a deodar branch.
It fills, empties, fills again
with the indifferent weather.
A flag for no country.
A lung for the vacant house.
A ghost and a seed, both.