roshan - this is a lovely poem - please read it carefully

PART 1




How do I begin?

Should I say that we thought more before,

And now it’s nothing but words.

Walking down a dim path in a dark wood,

Skipping through the light- speckled path,

Enchanted by life’s meanings, which we thought

We understood.

Until we met death - then we turned away,

Moving towards things we understand.

And we shrugged and shook our heads,

And said,

“That’s just something we don’t know”,




How should it matter?




When we are joyous and we drown in it,

Throwing away bottles in the street,

Not caring but smiling at everyone,

We look towards the skies and smile,

And think to our own prosthetic selves,

“Oh, how fortunate we are”.

And we look towards the skies and say,

“Thank you for making it this way”.




And when we are drowned in our joys,

Till we become breathless with grief,

We look down upon the earth, and shake our fists,

And then we say to ourselves,

“Oh, how could you make it this way?”




And when we are afloat,

Riding the sea between grief and joy,

And we grant ourselves the freedom to be,

Uncommitted to anything we see.

For we have no worries to trouble our mind,

And no worries to thank the very thing,

That we condemned an hour back.


We see that we are really

Transient life.

Inconsequential in every effort,

Disgustingly insignificant in the face of the world.

And our questions may change the axis,

Of other planets, but in ours

We remain but bugs that eat into

Its core, diving deeper into our end.

Multiplying our destruction.




And one day, I walked to a place,

Once glorified in itself, now it’s past

Lay spread out on the ground-

A few boulders and a broken wall.

Insects grew in its secret corners,

Planning and scheming each other’s death.




So I bent down beneath the green ivy,

Peering down beneath the green ivy,

Under a boulder that gave no shade,

(the Writer coughed and showed me his spade,

For it was he who made this rock.)

A stream flowed beneath the rock,

Sparkling like every stream does.

It flowed swiftly over my feet,

And then continued down until it met

A large plain, and then they held each other deep

And flowed towards the end of an

Unending plain.




And after a while, I looked down at my feet,

and the sky had reflected itself on them,

and it had imprinted itself on them,

and so I walked on through the broken city,

with the sky printed on my feet.

Wherever I went the sky spread out beneath me,

Until the whole city became the sky,

And I hung in between the clouds, wondering

If at all I wish to go back.

But before my eyes, the world unfolded,

Beneath my feet the world unfolded,

Like a paper cube of perfect design,

It unfolded its secrets and its paths,

Until everything seemed to be just one fold.

I bent forward to see this secret,

To perceive this answer to questions time immemorial,

I squinted my eyes until they bled,

But yet I could not go beyond the fold.




PART 2




Breaking the last structures of man,

The statues sang among themselves,

Complimenting each other on their perfection,

And singing a song of praise for their creator-

Their creator, the great author.

The statues stood beneath the trees,

Beneath the swaying green trees.

And on each leaf of the tree there lurked

A few enemies of man, whispering

To the wind to rape the forests.




His vast lands rolled out before him,

Blue and soft with clouds and trees,

And animals and birds.

After a while a tear rolled down his cheek,

While he stood on a cliff surveying his lands,

And he was surprised for he was not sad.

The tear rolled down to fall at his feet,

Where it formed a great ocean which

Destroyed his land in torrents of vast salty

Water.

And he looked towards his land and cried more,

For now his grief fell upon him like a sharp hammer.

But he did not flee into anger, for he knew,

That he was not crying for himself.

And so he wiped his tears and jumped into

His ocean of tears,

Where he sank like a stone,

And there were no marks upon him,

Where the water had touched,

Instead there were patterns, that

Touched every man and woman and child,

From life till death.




Part 3




We sat at home and wept in our lust,

Working away systematically at our lust.

Until we get up and look and laugh,

At the previous moments and shrug again.

Over time we become hard like rock,

And let no winds of pity or faith

Eat away at our thoughts.

For the moment’s glory is worth life itself,

Worth every promise and word unkempt.

And then before we go back to the grind,

To our faithful objects of eternal love,

Our ever blooming flowers of love,

We wash our hands and forget about the

Moment that in its essence did somehow,

Destroy our real life’s love.




Then the plain continues forever,

So immaculate and plain that my eyes,

Hurt with trying to find something-

A slight bump, a slight curve.

None exist on this terrible plain.

Except hurt and lust to make a dent,

In this plain that is our life.