Dearest Tanya,
A very happy birthday to you,
And before you get more wise,
Read this, with your heart, not your eyes.
The story goes back 19 years,
When a young set foot in a foreign land,
On a mission to give company in a town not far from the sea,
To you, Mom, brother and Dad so busy
Ironic, the young man was himself lost,
With no idea whatsoever about what the future held,
In a town with no friends, only forced acquaintances,
He started a new life, away from home, at quite a distance
The man dove in the deep end of the pool,
And took a seven hundred level course at the school.
Tortured by grades, the beauties went unnoticed,
Tormented by the winter, surviving was the new cool
That was one of the coldest winters the man, or Raleigh, had seen,
The lectures were hard, the bills were high,
The weekends always seemed weeks away and short,
When his sister came and rescued him away from the campus lot
For two days, 101 Nottingham, was where life happened,
When he found all the warmth in the cold winter days,
Relishing the ice-cream cake from your first birthday,
The taste of which lingers to this very day.
After the vociferous cries of your Allahabadi cousin,
Yours seemed like a gentle squeal to the man,
Who found it extremely amusing to see a child
Have muted cries mixed with those near toothless smiles.
The bones thawed, the mind freshened up,
After playing and cuddling up with you,
In your cute little bed listening to the lullabies,
The man, to an onlooker, was the big baby boy.
Little did you realize what you did to him,
While you went about being your natural self,
In that small house, in a little town,
Building big dreams with your small, little hands.
Keep that child alive, it saves lives and dreams,
You don’t always have to know what you are doing,
How you are freshening up minds, spreading light,
Spreading warmth when the frigid strikes.
Comments