Most read ▸
Balachandran V
Once again, at the gates of another year.
In this endless desert
The New Year sits like a façade,
A prop
On the other side of which
The endless desert continues.
We will go through the rituals
Of living, loving, playing and crying
Bringing and burying lives-
The perfunctory calls and messages
‘Happy New Year’-
We will go on with the play-acting,
Feigning interests new
Bidding farewells to old.
We conjure up illusions of oases
When all around the desert spreads.
Once more into my arid days like dew,
Like wind from an oasis, or the sound
Of cold sweet water bubbling underground,
A treacherous messenger, the thought of you
Comes to destroy me; once more I renew
Firm faith in your abundance, whom I found
Long since to be but just one other mound
Of sand, whereon no green thing ever grew.
And once again, and wiser in no wise,
I chase your colored phantom on the air,
And sob and curse and fall and weep and rise
And stumble pitifully on to where,
Miserable and lost, with stinging eyes,
Once more I clasp,--and there is nothing there.