A Rotting Leaf Masquerading as the sole of a Pharaoh’s Sandal by Ravindra Tandon

A rotting leaf in the Bougainville Park, that I clicked on the first evening of this year, haunted me for days, resulting in an experimental poem in surrealism. 

 

Pray assure me, don’t I resemble

Neil Armstrong’s stamped foot on the moon’s Tranquility?

Perhaps, more likely I am the fossilised remnants 

of an ancient sole of a sandal 

that might have unwittingly slipped off a royal foot,

Maybe that of a Pharaoh, Ahmose or Khufu,

minutes before he was decimated by his long-necked sister-wife

In the incestuous sands of Nubia or Giza,

and mummified by Men of Anubis,

sans the royal luggage from within, 

Packed and loaded in a gold-turquoise boat,  

majestically drifting heavenward 

In the moonlight of hieroglyphics- chiseled, midnight-blue Nile waters,

Weaving the river in silver, sapphire and gold?

 

But then I believe I am a poor decaying leaf,

in a dilemma,

Who I am after all

, with a trickle of life still left in me,

to resuscitate me with impossible promises

To rejuvenate my flagging confidence,

For I could have been prematurely plucked,

In the same way the green-twig boy king, had been felled untimely,

In the Sylvan green

bliss and soft wind, wafting in unison 

with my very being,

In the light,

sifting through the stellar kaleidoscopes

In an acacian arcadia,

Intoxicating the earth below

With magical frolicking since time immemorial.

 

The leaf that

I was, or the royal sole, if you please, what indeed I have been,

crafted from the tough hide of a young crocodile on the Nile,

I feel that I too was cursed to an inversed fate,

Left to be mouldering on the sands of eternal time, 

almost being crushed by your foot.

They say my schizophrenia is incurable,

awareness of which is insufferable. 

Alas!