"A Gray Haze Over the Rice Fields" by Jayanta Mahapatra

Mahapatra was born in India which is where this poem takes place.  The speaker remembers his childhood and how different things are now.  His grandma is no longer alive and he no longer gets to watch over the rice fields and the cattle.  Now all the speaker has to hold onto are the memories that are a "dangling thread" that "stops halfway down, where [his] hands cannot touch it."  The gray haze mentioned in the title is the lost memories.  They are no longer apart of the past or apart of the future.  That is why the speaker can no longer reach his memories.  They have been taken away by some sort of disaster in his country that has made it change so much that nothing is the same as it was.  All that is left is an unreachable haze that floats over the rice fields.  The worst part is that the speaker wants to reach them and go back to the way they were, but it is never going to happen.