It was an antique cupboard
with glass panelled doors
which we had never seen open.

Beautifully crafted from 
burnished Burma teak,
it held all kinds of wonders

that to our child's eyes would speak
of worlds old and new, and unlock
magic portals in the blood.

Exquisite dolls and handmade pottery,
bottles of elusive Arabian scents,
a little rocking horse forever waiting

to be rocked, a flowering head of coral
whispering the ocean's secret,
full of promise exotic,

a gilded ballerina caught
in an elegant, eternal twirl,
oh, if only we could touch her!

Mementos from different countries
gifted by friends and relatives
over the years and so much more.

It came as a shock years later
when on a visit home, I found
the charmed cabinet out in the yard,

its doors hanging open,
its precious hoard exposed to the elements,
forlorn in its dilapidated displacement,

evidently cast out to make place
for newer pieces of furniture
more suited to, well, newer tastes.

I searched for the coral piece
and other forbidden treasures
of my childhood, in vain,

and came to see the cupboard
for what it really was, a repository
of tokens and trinkets, baubles and bling,

a museum of mundane memorabilia,
totemic trove of trivia,
also, the insignias of our innocence

now consigned to the far edge of things
in the way of the world,
forgotten and lost.

In that moment as the illusions
tumbled out of my shelves
in the unspectacular light of day

I grew up.
                        

She stood a little to the side
of the group in the photograph,
aloof in a crowd

not aware, perhaps, of her distance
or of the split in the self,
a part of her confidently

in communion with her companions
and the other posing consciously,
affecting an attitude she wasn't sure of.

It was the camera
which picked out
the shadowy side of the moon,

as it contemplated
a different existence
beyond the frame of things,

in some other world
not just black and white
but informed with a strange light,

not correlated by coordinates, 
but rapt in readiness to merge
with or emerge from the vital verge.