Do Shadows Speak?

Do shadows speak?
I think mine does.
It follows me everywhere.

In my room. In the garden. I found it at my school too…
and no it will not say its name.
Maybe, it is the wolf from the story!
Is it tired, sleeping the day off on my wall?
I lift my arm. It lifts its arm.
I stamp my feet and it does too.

It laughs with me and cries too.
We are playing a game
whose rules I am still inventing.

Where did the water go from the puddle by the window?

I loved the jump and splash yesterday.
The sun drank it, says Mumma.
Did it gulp it all in one gold swallow?
Greedy Sun, I want the puddle back.

Sun is thirsty in the afternoons, says my teacher.
Let me pour it some water then. Sun, do you need more?
Can I make it reach the sky?

Let me tip the blue bowl over and let it rain upwards!

Splash!!!

I drop my spoon again
I want to be sure the floor is still there,
still catching, still keeping its promise.
It does. The floor is a friend. I can trust it.

I note the sweet, sour, soar and sure

Some neurons inside me connect some dots.

I carry a universe within.

My pockets are fat with the world.

Five pebbles, a curl of dried leaf,
and I have a petal soft as a whisper.
They are not pebbles.
They are dragon eggs, they are pirate gold, they are moons
too small and shy to hang in the sky,
they are crumbs that lead the lost Hansel and Gretal home.
I line them up. I change my mind. I line them up again.

I think with my hands,

I think on the floor, out loud,
turning and twisting objects until they turn into a tale, and then another…

Whoa! Look the light came apart in the puddle,
red and green and yellow and swimming loose…

It follows and curls about my finger in the water!
Is it a rainbow that slipped and fell and got its shoes wet?
Who spilled it? Was it me? Can I do it again?

The clouds are melting elephants.
The wind is combing the hair of the trees.
The whole world is showing off, just for me,
and I am finding out, something new, something to be.

My teacher sits down beside me,
she looks at what I am looking.

She listens to me.
She waits. She wonders with me.
What do you see, she asks, and I show her.
What do you wonder, and my wonder grows a second head,
then a third, then a hundred… a hydra of why’s explode within me.
She listens, she thinks with her hands,

explores through my wonders,

and finds them with me.

She’s like the floor I can trust. She gets me.

When my tower falls she does not sigh.
She says, what will you try now,
as if the falling were a door,
not the end.

So I try it the other way round.
I try it a third way, a fourth, a fifth…eleventh.
My hands are learning what I can’t verbalise yet. The words are yet to be.

Something in me is watching me learn,
a small still me behind my eyes
who asks, did that work? and why?
It keeps the map of all the roads I tried.
I like experiments.

I am small. I am simple. I am not stupid.

I contain multitudes.

The petal is a boat now. The shadow is its sail.
The pebbles are the island, ringed in crocodile sea,
and the dried leaf is the brave girl who tells the story

of her adventures at sea.

Do shadows speak?
They do.

They understand my hundred languages,

And I theirs.

Mine is yawning now, stretching thin and long,

telling me the day is done.

Tomorrow I will ask it something new,

and the water, and the wind, and the light in the little pool,

for the world is a book that keeps its best pages loose,

its spine uncracked, its ending nowhere near,

and I have only just begun to read.

- Dr Amrita (from a child’s eye)