Where am I?
Who am I?
Where am I going?
Questions drifted in my mind
In the middle of the sea
Losing my way
Exhaustion seeping
Into my bones
I thought about the place
Where I once lived
With happiness and peace
With my family
Then the drought struck
Wrenching everything
Away from me
Nothing was left
No food no water
No shelter no money
My kids cried
Hunger eating them alive
They drank their own tears
Their throats bleeding dry
And then even their tears ran out
Making us enter the sea
Going somewhere else would be
Better than this, wouldn’t it?
The journey began in a small fishing boat
Desperation in the tides
Everything was alive
For the longest period of time
But then the cyclone came
And all of them died
Except for me, for some odd reason
Letting me survive till the end
And now I’m in the somewhere else
Food water shelter money
All just an hour’s work away
But yet I still wonder
Where am I?
Who am I?
Where am I going?
Manasa Kaliki is an author and poet located in India. She predominantly writes Haikus, and in the occasion that she does write a poem, focuses on topics such as ‘Nature’, and ‘Relations’, and her observations on life.