On Children’s Day, instead of recycling the same old fables, we thought it would be so much more meaningful if we were to revisit Cinderella and Frog Prince today, as adults. What do we make of the morals - of the prince coming to Cinderella’s rescue? Of the toad turning to a beautiful young prince? In a hilarious takedown, the poet writes,
‘I touched many toads
They squirmed and looked at me with disbelief’
It’s not very different from what Philip Larkin found saying himself, a working man looking forward to a mundane life, some seven decades ago
"For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow"
In other words, toads are what they are. They don’t shapeshift. But then to commemorate the spirit of the day, the telling and retelling of memorable stories, we leave our readers on a hopeful note. We talk about a handsome little prince and about roses who,
"grow more beautiful
If you tell them stories"
Glass Slippers and A Toad
" Cinderella could have stayed home
And written notes about an imagined ball
And invented the characters
Maybe worn velvet slippers in deep crimson
Rather than leaving a glass slipper behind
Such a wannabe, I think.
Although as a little girl when I read her story
I cheered and clapped when the prince found her
So, in my late thirties I think little girls
Should not read such fairy tales
Where a prince finds a girl
With a slipper in hand
Or a toad becomes a prince
I touched many toads
They squirmed and looked at me with disbelief
They scurried away
The moral is that a toad is a toad"
The Little Prince In A Shop Window
"Someone saw a forlorn prince
In a shop window in Bilbao
That someone sent me a photo
I saw the rose and the fox
And the nine worlds
Although they weren’t in the frame
In one of it, a man owned the stars
Business-like, a venture capitalist maybe
But what if you could own the stars,
count them everyday to see if anyone’s missing, give them names after the departed
The handsome Little Prince
must have more stories to tell
about the worlds he traveled
I grow roses on a parched terrace
They say roses grow more beautiful
If you tell them stories
of faraway lands
That way, they would grow
up as dreamers
Like the forlorn-looking prince
In a shop window in Bilbao
Who you must bring back
If only for the sake unborn roses”
