Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad is a Sydney based artist, poet, and improv pianist. She has a Masters degree in English and has worked in both media and education. Oormila is a member of the North Shore Poetry Project and performs her work regularly at venues in Sydney.
Noughts and Crosses
Freshly forty. Reinventing.
The world of academia
now a cobwebbed memory
ten years dead,
I don my new avatar-
small time teacher,
sometime comedienne,
chatty storyteller,
at a suburban studio.
I teach six year olds to peel
the whorled hearts of flowers,
Channel the eye of a Georgia O’keeffe,
Plot cornfields and crows and lily ponds.
Skim the skies in Chagall flight.
They hang on the lilt of my every word,
adulation in their eyes,
the front of my apron a Pollock dribble-
smears and spatters of
hands and hugs.
It’s only at the end of class
when I turn cleaner,
Soaping and scrubbing
stains off wood,
That the dolour creeps in,
and my life appears to me
a mesh of noughts and crosses,
more chequered, more scribbled
than the plastic painting mats.
And when some of the parents
look through me,
As their children wave goodbye,
It gurgles rancid, to the surface.
thin and vaporous
as the cleaning fluid I spritz.
I resist the urge to proclaim
in my dark, contralto voice,
Something as idiotic,
and ironic,
as, “ I was the valedictorian
of my graduating class, you know!”
As though that would earn me :
Eye contact,
Worthiness,
Redemption.