Most love poems try to make a moment last. Balachandran V's short poem, marked "Trivandrum, 13-01-2009" and titled "From nowhere to eternity," does the opposite. It begins at the largest scale imaginable and lets love slip into it, quietly and a little cruelly, until the idea of an everlasting love starts to look childish.
The first line sounds more like a textbook than a lyric: "Life is a continuum." The word is cold and scientific, and the speaker leans into it. "Extending" gets a line to itself, so the reader waits while the sentence stretches. Three "from… to…" phrases follow, and each widens the lens in a different direction: time ("a nanosecond to trillions of millenniums"), biology ("a bacterium to bacteria") and astronomy ("a star to a black hole"). Words like "nanosecond" and "millenniums" take real breath to say, so the lines seem to expand as we read them. The middle example is odd, though. Going from "bacterium" to "bacteria" is a change in number, not size, from singular to plural. Life here looks less like a ladder of progress than like endless multiplication, with individuals dissolving into populations. The star collapsing into a black hole is darker still, a glowing thing ending as an absence. The ellipsis after "black hole..." leaves a pause in which we feel how far we have travelled from anything human.
Then the voice changes. "In between, you and me, my dear" is small, spoken and affectionate. The lovers are squeezed "in between" star and black hole, and the verb the speaker chooses is gentle: "we weave our lives from eon to eon." Weaving suggests thread, patience and something made by hand. It gives the couple dignity even though the eon dwarfs them.
The next lines puncture that dignity. "how naive / to think our love is eternal!" is broken into short, sharp pieces, and the exclamation mark stings. The speaker may be mocking himself as much as anyone. The poem then repeats the "how" construction ("how ephemeral are our lives, / our loves"), as if the first outburst needed a calmer second statement. "Lives" and "loves" differ by a single vowel, so the two words sound almost identical, as though the loves were as fragile as the lives that hold them. There is no end-rhyme and no regular metre. The rhythm comes from the contrast between those long, stretched opening lines and these abrupt short ones, which suits a poem arguing that the universe cannot be fitted to a neat measure.
The ending is the most striking part. "just beyond our fingertips / the void waits to take us back." The void is not distant but almost within reach, and it is patient, since it "waits." "Take us back" implies we came from it, which links to the title: we set out from "nowhere," and nowhere reclaims us. Then a hyphen cuts the line short and the pronoun narrows from "us" to "you, cosmic dust!" The phrase is ambiguous. It could be a tender nickname, a brutal reminder of what the beloved's body will become, or both at once. Notably, the speaker addresses the other person rather than including himself, as if looking at a face and seeing the atoms behind it.
The poem's significance lies in this mix of science and intimacy. It belongs to the old tradition of poems that remind lovers how short time is, but it replaces graves and withering flowers with nanoseconds, bacteria and black holes. It also contains a tension it never resolves. The couple weave their lives "from eon to eon," yet eternal love is called naive. One could read this as despair. One could also read the tenderness of "my dear" as a quiet counter-argument, since the ability to speak to one person across such emptiness may be the only permanence on offer. The poem leaves that choice to the reader, and that restraint is what keeps its short lines resonating.