Author: Sovira Lal, Class XI C
Somewhere beneath an unfamiliar sky,
where no one speaks my name aloud,
a seed broke open the same morning
my first breath startled the world.
No witnesses marked its beginning.
No applause greeted its struggle upward.
Yet beneath soil and sky,
we signed the same invisible contract with time.
It learned courage from storms.
I learned it from heartbreak.
It reached for light without knowing why;
I searched for meaning with the same hunger.
When I bent under unseen weight,
perhaps its branches trembled too.
When I outgrew old versions of myself,
its bark thickened, quietly brave.
Perhaps when I felt alone,
its leaves were trembling in distant wind.
Perhaps when hope returned to me,
spring arrived for it too.
Maybe one day I will find it,
neither by a map, nor by direction,
but by pure recognition,
a sudden feeling of home.
Until then, we grow separately,
yet never alone ,
two lives unfolding in parallel,
proof that time nurtures more
than what the eyes can see.
That growth is slow, yet deeply worn
for I am not alone, forlorn.
Somewhere a tree still greets each morn,
the very one that sprouted
the day I was born.
