Poetic Sensibility

37 - Poetry Together

Sarah was pretty sure that if one went by the wide grin on her face, one could say that she was having a pretty darn fantastic day. It started of with her waking up to find Kabir sitting in her drawing room. He was speaking to her parents when she had just come out of her bedroom to grab a cup of coffee from the kitchen. Thank heavens she wasn't wearing her Snuffy The Rabbit pyjamas. She greeted him and asked him to wait as she quickly showered and dressed.

"So what's up?" she asked him.

"It's poetry day, technically," he replied.

Poetry day? But Romi and the others were in Paris. Was she going to have a poetry day with Kabir alone?! Sarah's heart started dancing to the tune of a popular song from Imagine Dragons as she did a little dance in her head.

"All right, then," she replied. "Let me just fetch my notebook. Or you know what, we can just sit in my room." Oh dear. She really needed to know when to shut up. What would Kabir think of what she had just said? What exactly had she implied? What did she want? Blame it on the Kabirism, her head told her, as she headed to her room and Kabir followed in.

Kabir had seen her room thousands of times before but for the first time Sarah felt supremely conscious. Probably because they were sort of, kind of 'dating'. Yes, they most definitely were, if the number of texts they exchanged were any indication. She didn't need facebook to tell her whether they were seeing each other or not. She already had proof of that if she looked at the texts they had exchanged at 2 AM just last night. Funny how Kabir had forgotten to inform her that he was coming over.

"Got anything to read?" she asked him.

Kabir shook his head, "I wish. It's odd that when I feel overcome with all these funny, girly emotions about infatuation etc, I have nothing to write about at all. I sat at my desk for hours and came up with nothing."

Sarah was trying very hard to appear sympathetic and not blush and gush over what he had just said. He was infatuated. With her. Santa Claus was singing Jingle Bells in her head now as her heart beat changed the song to a qucik sexy samba. She could have conjured the most powerful patronus charm ever right now.

"I've never quite been able to compose poetry at will, myself," she replied. Which was true. She wasn't one of those who could sit down with a pen and paper for a while and a poem would just come to them. She had to spend hours deliberating and thinking and rhyming.

"Really?" Kabir asked with genuine interest. "How do you go about the process then?"

Sarah thought about it for a moment. How did she go about it, indeed. "Well, I usually have a broad idea for the subject of the poem. Mostly it's an every day thing. For example it could be sitting with my dad and enjoying a cricket match. Or eating an ice cream on a hot day. I would probably spend hours thinking about how it makes me feel and what it makes me think of. There are a multiple chain of thoughts that go off in just about every direction. I hang on to one and follow the tangent, I suppose. Exploring it, I try to put it down in a simple prose format. Something like an essay. And then I will try to convert that prose into verse by drawing comparisons and imagery. What about you?" She had often wondered how Kabir's adorable head worked.

"It's different every time," he replied. "And yet not so different."

Typical. This was just like Kabir. Being all mysterious and smoking hot. Well, she wasn't going to give up just yet. "Care to explain?"

"I sort of write poetry mostly in the form of a recollection. I would rarely ever write about any kind of anticipation or something that is yet to occur. I prefer to write about things that happened in the past. I would want to have a look at how I felt about it then and how I feel about that now, in retrospect. Weird, isn't it?" he asked.

Sarah nodded, "Yes. But weird is good. So, in retrospect, do you regret not accompanying the gang to Paris?" Fingers crossed.

Kabir thought about it for a moment. He then looked her in the eye and replied, "No. I don't. I am more than happy to be here."

Sarah now believed that it was possible for her to die of heart failure because the heart beat samba had just gone into death metal mode. She was ecstatic about this alone time that she had with Kabir. She couldn't wait to tell Sam everything!

"What about you?" he asked. "I mean, have you written anything?"

"I have but I'd rather not read it," she replied with complete honesty. "I don't like it very much as it's not even passably good."

Kabir didn't argue with her. He probably knew that Sarah was quite confident about everything she said or did. When she felt shy or conscious or worried about something, she was almost always right. The poem that Sarah had written was about seeing your task to the end. It was about abandoning something halfway. It was about leaving things unfinished. And at the same time, it was always about completing what you have started. It was about commitment and being impassioned. Somewhere along the lines of that poem, she had realized what the Soup Kitchen Project meant to Kabir. It meant a lot to her too, but in a different way than it did him. It was then that she had vowed to herself that she would find a way to get herself to feel as empathetic towards people as he did. And when she did, she would volunteer alongside him. Always, always alongside him.

Her thoughts were interrupted when Kabir suddenly said, "Tell you what. Let's write a poem now. Together."

And they did.