S-E-C-R-E-T.
What image does that six letter word conjure in your mind?
A whisper?
A conspiracy . . . Secret Society?
Rumour mongering? Gossiping?
I remember the nursery rhyme that went ‘Seven for a Secret never to be told’. It does have a sinister, hush-hush aura about it, doesn’t it? On the other hand, it’s also funny how much stress a single word can thrust upon you, sending you into an emotional whirlwind if you are the melodramatic kind. If you’ve not been made privy to a secret, you feel betrayed, your very faithfulness is under the scanner. If someone has indeed deemed you worthy of sharing a secret, you feel elated, proud and trusted although that’s no guarantee that you’ll not, in turn, share the secret with someone else, making the whole thing redundant.
Which begs the question -How many people need to be involved in this verbal transaction for it to qualify as a secret? A quote by Benjamin Franklin goes:
‘Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead.’
Does that mean a secret is a one-person thing? Is it possible for a person to successfully hide it from the world without choking? And do secrets really die with a person or do they assume a life of their own even after the person bearing it is dead? Well, I truly don’t know. But I do know what you can do to try and wriggle out that secret from me! Here’s a poem by yours truly enunciating just that:
Secret
©Priya Narayanan 2016, All rights reserved
Pour me a drink.
My stories are in the bubbles
that rush past. Fleeting, floating,
rapturous, rumbustious –
my stories are the ones
that kiss your lips
and tingle your senses
before common sense prevails
and strangles each story
lest you gulp them down
and become one with them.
Pour me a drink.
My stories are in the ice cubes
that float like fish
in the koi pond
where you come to feast your eyes
on the streaks of golden orange,
your passionate gaze
causing them to sink to the bottom
from where only a coin diver
can collect them again –
if he has faith that they do indeed exist.
Pour me a drink.
My stories are in the numbness
of my tongue –
my otherwise wagging tongue
that is now paralyzed into silence.
Can you hear the stories
in my silence? Can you see
the stories in my eyes,
where the pupils
have been replaced
by the moon and his darker twin?
How long does it take for a story
to travel from the eyes and the ears
to the tongue?
Pour me a drink
and I might let you into my little secret.
The Crooked Pencil 