This poem belongs to a friend who years ago shared it with me. I often read her words. Listen to them. These words feel difficult at times but believe me, every time they resonated an answer. An answer to the unknown; that would reverberate through being and not being. I once asked her to share her words with me. I remember her telling me, what these words meant to her. She restrained me not to share these fragments of her. Clearly to her, these words are her being and yet she would constantly look for herself through these words. She told me to preserve and contain these words within me. It has been madness. A madness to a language that I would seek hereupon.
Years later, after a casual conversation, she wrote to me again, while tracing the shades and tones of that day. This time the reluctance of previous years had vanished. We both would look for the remnants of the past years. After all these years, perhaps, we had arrived at an answer. We both had realized about the betrayal of time. The time that never existed; and memories, the answer, chased us back to it.
We had been told to write letters. I am scared of writing words. This is perhaps the reason, I am using her words. I am aware of the betrayal, of Time, that abandoned us before our being and not being and the impossibility of translation.
Today, amid that reluctance to lend tongue to these thoughts that remain incarcerated within me, I write. While the air is filled with the rhythms of Sufi choirs, I would sit back and gather the bits and pieces. It is an attempt to look for our being in the ‘loss that is us placed in time that is neither here, nor there’.
These poems are addressed to that loss.
#35
the sabotaged shrieks of gloom
they reside silently inside your deep eyes
your eyes, barbed eyes
curfewed eyes
that wall every way through them
cemented eyes
solid thru the ink of agonised verses
and abrupt full stops
i remember the shades that your eyes cast
as we sat under Zabarwan
i heard you for the first time
and the last too
as we walked by Gupkar Road
i said beautiful
you said torture
we stopped by the crowded boulevard
amid drunken tourists
heaven they said
and you sketched to me the pattern of hell
i heard you endlessly
thru the night
and then we departed
i loaded with your stories
and you no lighter
as you saw
pain could be sung of
but not shared
your reluctance to utter,
scars my memories now
your silence lulls me to disdain
i carried your pain in me, i said
but I lived it all alone, anyway, you replied
thank you for your verses dear, you console
but poetry doesn’t sum up the tangible atrocities
sometimes,
you whisper
and fade away into the dense mists
with no traces of return
your absence beloved!
how do i carry this void
an existence of existence devoid
listen, if not answer,
but i lost my reasons in your eyes…