You buy water in plastic bottles.
After eleven years from now,
you would buy oxygen in glass bottles.
The girl who stays with you in the hostel
will say that she prefers hers with vanilla
flavor.
Elephants would have been extinct by then.
The buildings would be touching the moon.
The moon is not an electric light-bulb that
you can change with another.
You would listen to your favorite symphony:
Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata selected
by a robot who stays as your personal assistant.
The robot had come as a birthday gift from your sister
who lives in Hong Kong; she would have
metamorphosed into paintings by then as people
would no longer make any sense to her.
One night you too would feel nauseous in the
cacophony of swarming people and ghosts
of extinct bees; do call me then.
We would talk about Sylvia Plath, confessional
poetry; Pablo Neruda, romantic style;
Maya Angelou, poems of angst and survival;
and discuss about the new emerging voices in writing
And then perhaps we would both feel fine while looking
at the moon from our windows.
Poem by Avijeet Das