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Balachandran V
The cemetery was rather
Asymmetrical.
It sloped easterly,
Uneven, not neat rows
Of the dead.
Marked and unmarked
Some tombs, sarcophaguses
Some graves marble laid
Shining black.
And then, there were plain, cemented ones.
Carved crosses adorned some
Some had plain solid C-R-O-S-S.
Withered wreaths and bouquets lay around.
It was a winter morning
Mist still slept among the graves.
Slipping over the wall
Looking through old albums, reliving,
Moments captured long ago,
I sense me smiling
Sometimes wincing,
Sometimes unfeeling,
Sometimes marvelling and then again
Flipping past, lest pain infiltrate my mind -
Suddenly, I stop, shocked, realizing
That they are just images -
They don't exist - no more, never again.
Flipping through Henri’s* pictures,
I see how desperate he was, like me,
To freeze time.
Fleeting are our lives - the ones you see smiling,
Crying, frowning, deep in thought, their inner selves revealed
A glimpse offered in these frozen images
And then taken away in the flood.
Faster, quicker than the flowing water,
Life flees, swirls and then disappears -
All that remains is a dash between
A year and another...
Thoughts sandwich with pure lust and beauty's in action when the beasts attempt stasis. Thorns are allowed to exist. The green beans steaming are themselves cousin to the good news they've been trying to give away. And whose body doesn't tremble with good night kisses, pebble relaxation confronting the amoeboid calendar.
The pictures we've been showing one another, the photographs of large numbers of people serve no purpose. As if we weren't private enough already. Too sensitive to the cut of our own diaries to bask in the blank pages. Let me lead you gently behind your next thought.
Do you remember, passer-by, the path
I wore across the lot where now stands the opera house
Hasting with swift feet to work through many years?
Take its meaning to heart:
You too may walk, after the hills at Miller’s Ford
Seem no longer far away;
Long after you see them near at hand,
Beyond four miles of meadow;
And after woman’s love is silent
Saying no more: “I will save you.”
And after the faces of friends and kindred
Become as faded photographs, pitifully silent,
Sad for the look which means:
“We cannot help you.”
And after you no longer reproach mankind
With being in league against your soul’s uplifted hands—
They brought me ambrotypes
Of the old pioneers to enlarge.
And sometimes one sat for me—
Some one who was in being
When giant hands from the womb of the world
Tore the republic.
What was it in their eyes?—
For I could never fathom
That mystical pathos of drooped eyelids,
And the serene sorrow of their eyes.
It was like a pool of water,
Amid oak trees at the edge of a forest,
Where the leaves fall,
As you hear the crow of a cock
From a far-off farm house, seen near the hills
Where the third generation lives, and the strong men