Dark Angels
by Meenakshi Sajeev
The four year olds lined up.
All in pleated pinafores.
Blue.
With white handkerchiefs
Pinned to the lapels.
All of them.
Pint sized humans.
Marched into the selection room
Like a line of dolls
From a factory’s conveyor belt.
It was almost Christmas.
The Nativity scene has to be set up.
“Who wants to be an angel?”
We all did.
Little hands shot up in air,
One, two and too many.
Oh no, that’s too many angels.
They had to pick.
The teacher’s finger- long and slender,
Pointed easily to three children,
Who no doubt,
Resembled Raphael’s cherubs.
They put on the wings and halo.
And the teacher applied blush,
On their rosy chubby cheeks
Which needed no blushing.
That night I laid on bed
Looked at my wrists
And wished for an angel
With the skin of midnight’s cape,
With scrawny limbs
Bulging knees and elbows,
To appear in my teacher’s dreams.
Just so that maybe tomorrow,
Maybe,
She might see an angel,
When she looks my way too.
Meenakshi Sajeev is the author of “The Unlabelled Happy Woman” (2014) and “One Woman Island” (2018). She hails from Trivandrum, India. She is a Civil Engineer turned Corporate Communications person, educated in the UK. She worked in the UN- Environment in Geneva for a short while after which she divides her time in India and in Germany as a freelancer. She has been selected as one of the three woman poets for a poetry event- PoetsThree, held at Trivandrum in 2015. She was also selected as a panelist for “South Indian Writer’s Enclave” –a national lit. fest at Kerala in 2017.
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