Gathering colours

Questions in waiting, 

patiently, the children gather colours, new numbers, new letters and words - so many of them. Then they break. Carefree, they run in streams of excitement, and the rough-and-tumble choir with a thousand voices, bursts out of the schoolyard. They can hardly be confined within the bounds of civilisation. One sad fact they have not been taught yet is that they are unwittingly rehearsing adulthood. But anyway…

Above this, the full sun does its reckoning in terms of warmth and brightness and – how does it happen that people suddenly smile in the street, and the shopping mall is full of gleaming customers who buy the happiness-enhancing brand-new merchandise without checking the price, as if everything is free? Transactions become as holy as the give-and-take between embryo and placenta? For the sun knows but does not lose sleep over the fact that it is a solitary stone flung across sweltering vacuums of space – when risen, he is the most loved and sought after, the largest and best of companies. This being the case, the night is endured.

And further up, encased in bubbles rising, they leave. Having counted the minutes, the hours, having made sums of days and years, they forget, thus deleting pages of all the "ographies", "onomies" and "ologies" that once invaded and annexed their heads. For all its redefinitions, as useful as they might have been, the sun remained the same thing, a bit wearier perhaps: a rotating egg. No one knows who hatches this. And when it cracks open, no one hopes to witness a slow parturition; it’ll be an instant birth of wings. It will be lesson over. But there is still hope (even if their fragile smiles are mere reflections of indestructible matter, or even if their ‘deathless spirit’ is but evaporated blood) as long as…    

… Ah yes! children are turning up. They are coming over. In play or at work they have ganged up with, or against each other. They have said, "It's not fair", and played war. They have pleaded, "Everybody does it", to justify cruelty and silliness. But their pretexts haven't yet grown to adult vomit-inducements garnished with morality cant and court orders; their crimes are small, unlike adult nature crossing its own borders. But, most of all, their very size and shape commands affection. And, look here: every one of them holds a mirror turned outwards – they bring with them what was hidden: 

questions in waiting.