The rift

I was 10 when I walked into its world. It was a strange and grossly different from what I'd always imagined it to be. God knows the countless millions of words that I had spoken without ever imagining the curious letters that combined in a myriad different ways to give an aesthetic meaning to the sounds my tongue rolled out. The alphabet, I remember, was not an alphabet at all. It began with an unaspirated 'k' and rolled off the roof of my mouth till I reached the obscure letters at the end which I could only attempt to pronounce. Unlike the English language, there were few rules, albeit confusing at first, but far less convoluted. Letters hung from bars and ended with bars. I thought it lacked a sense of poetic fulfillment when you tried to get lines to rhyme. "It isn't poetry", frustrated, I resigned myself to think. "It's prose!" I listened patiently to the stories that were read out to me. There was something elusive about them, a sense of simplicity, yet bordering on philosophical completion that was abstract, fleeting and in a strange way, seductive. In contrast to the point blank candour of English, it appealed to a different part of me. I detested it. With listless enthusiasm I stared at the perennial 'A' beside '3rd language' on my report card, and eventually, I was glad to be spared of it when I turned 14.

19 years of apathy and now I realise that it really is poetry