POETRY

Sweetened Love

GiaB prompt #1 Confectionery

Not so long ago on a lousy spring day, my father stepped inside our home front-yard carrying a square-shaped box seemed to be a box of chocolates, my brother, sister and I circled around the mysterious box wrapped with paper fold, ‘What is this?’ — my sister asked; our father smiled and pointed towards the box to open it up.

Finally, the revealing and soon we smelled the sugary freshness in oval-shaped, not so chocolatey sized sweets, fully loaded in the big sweetbox and our hands laid upon those in curious craving. Ah, the juiciness — full of sweetened servings in our mouths, dripping down from mouth to fingers then stuck to our shirts with the dripped juice marks, and yet the savoring continued in each bite to the sweetly garnished browny, and our father, standing not far away enjoying our childish delight with his pleasant smile.

Days passed, years went by, I walked long from my childhood to adulthood, my destiny moved thousands of miles away from my country, yet the sweet memory remained fresh. And, I wait for the pandemic to over, and, I wait to revisit my parents, their fondle, and, I wait to enjoy their sweetened love in the form of that ‘Chom Chom.’

Poetry lyrics by Suntonu Bhadra

What is ‘Chomchom of Porabari’?: ‘Chomchom of Porabari’ is a renowned sweets that originated in a village called ‘Porabari’ of Bangladesh.(1) This ‘Chomchom’ is famous because of its burnt brick color, which typically came from caramelized sugar.(2)

Source 1: Wikipedia. Source 2: Get Bengal.

Thanks to Victor Sarkin for announcing the challenge & to Chirag for promoting the prompt in other platforms. Following is the official challenge link.

I’m reaching out to following fellow poets to enrich this challenge with their words (if convenient and if not already taken the prompt): Amy Marley, Paroma Sen, Carolyn Riker, Dennett, James G Brennan, Priyanka Srivastava, Timothy Key, Gurpreet Dhariwal, r.j. quirk, Riku Arikiri 🕊️. GiaB submission guideline in the link.