Summer home – a poem by Neera Kashyap

Summer home is based on the traditional Japanese Tanka structure of of 5/7/5/7/7 syllables per verse. It was first published in Mountain Path, July-September, 2017.

Summer home

rain comes to the hills

after the city desert

just as I enter home:

light, irregular, drumming –

rain and heart beats flow as one

*

here in solitude

Mind follows to sink in rest

in vistas of blue hills

then like a crouching cat… waits

to blot the hills with other thoughts

*

plump pink clouds nestle

in the blue rain washed ranges

I smile at the hues –

a girl rises from a sparse field

smiles at my pink umbrella

*

A peach tree in a

luscious orchard never fruits

a forest fire flares –

a singed orchard and the peach

shocked into pale pink flowering

                –Neera Kashyap