Imagination...

A long time ago, I read a book where the protagonist lived in a swamp. At that time, above the couch in our living room, we had a large wall poster of a forest path lined with trees. I was always fascinated about where the path would end. For some reason, after that book, this path would remind me of the description of the New Orleans swamps in that book. Dark skies, heavy trees, soggy soil and beauty in its midst. It was a leap and I guess that’s the best part of being imaginative. You can connect dots, or at least imagine connecting dots, that never existed. In this case, the path became a swamp, and the swamp became the root of a story. We can never understand how children go missing in life. What if a child went missing in the swamp? Of all the dreary and dark places, to die, what if a little girl died in the swamp? What if it was purely an accident and her parents never find out? The only witnesses to the accident are the trees around her, and if one day a tree could tell the story, it would be:

The Swamp

The mist curls off the swamp
The dark locks float along lifeless
The dark night carries a distinct stamp
The odour of death leaves me breathless…

The black shoe peeping from the water
Reminds me of a little girl lost
Wandering through the mist she totters
She slips and falls into her midnight grave forever…

Her lifeless tresses, her peeping shoes
They call to me like a beacon in the darkness
I can’t seem to stop my shaking knees
From moving unyieldingly towards the ghastly sight.

The pink crane, immobile on a log
Beauty in the midst of unimaginable horrors…
The sky darkens smoothly like wheels turned by a cog
It magnifies the mood of anguish and sorrow.

Green, brown and black
The colours of the swamp, sadness and the dead girl
One by one, feelings of mine I stack
Guilt, tears, anguish and horror.

Light drifts through the swamp
In spots like freckles on a child
It tries to seep through the a ground forever damp
From my never-ending tears for a lost child.

By,
Angela Archana Vincent.