Spring Cleaning

Poem from my archives | Of things lost and half found

Spring Cleaning


One by one,
we pull things out of the dust.
Old carrom board, broken study lamp.
A pair of muddy sneakers that once lit up
when my feet hit the ground. School uniforms,
things lost and half-found.
Relics of all the stiff blue summers
when I was waiting around
for the day my life would begin.
In this gauzy light, each broken thing
becomes a photograph.
I learn that the past is often inconvenient.
Neither usable, nor entirely
throw-away-able.
We start to say things like:
Maybe we can use these later.
We can keep these for the memories.
So we dust up the inconvenient things,
tape up the split sides,
and give them places to belong.
As for the rest: the deadweight,
the shreds, the scraps, the things
worn inside out for too long to bear.
A brief, questioning look follows them
as they descend into the toss pile.
And held in this gaze, the ancient
and imprecise arithmetic
of calculating
which memories are worth keeping.
The distance between what must leave
and what remains.

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Photo by Đặng Thanh Tú on Pexels