Written piece
Just a Meeting of Eyes
Prisha Aditi Palani
Malaysia
About this piece
This poem shares the hope that if we pay more attention to the people around us, and try once more to build connection, we might find comfort and empathy in the idea that we all, fundamentally, share the same experiences, that are like a "thread" holding us together.
On a crowded train
each of us stares down
at phone screens and laps
of solitude,
eyes engaged in the solemn business of not
looking
up.
But a chance glance,
a quick but weighty flick
of the eyes and,
they meet-
but for the briefest moment
curiosities collide,
sympathies swap,
and those eyes see themselves reflected
in a different shade of the same depths.
A swift and fleeting tug on the thread
that holds us all together,
it lingers half-longingly
in the minds that shared it.
As the train then rumbles along
and those eyes return to beyond the windows,
that gossamer strand sways,
frays along its length of
fragile hope,
aglow with a light
which heals.
And when the two who created that moment of light
(an imperceptible beacon in these twilit times)
exit the station at opposite ends
they carry with them a hope -
the possibility that
our thread might mend.