POVERTY OF LOVE

In trance the poet walked

In company of his spouse

Rhythm is nothing but a step

Attuned to his spouse’s walk

Conch shells empty

With nadabrahma* ready

The never-ending ecstasy of music

Rhymed in poets’ uncanny words.

Drowsily the poet moved

Weak,

A wreck on the pedestrian stones of the seas

Lust was nowhere in his rhymes

Love is all but affinity to a single soul.

Still attuned to love and lust,

The poet, harried, went across the seas

Spices had all drowned in the fathoms

Suspicion mingled with a wracking of the swans

The queen had grown a pond

Pond had a number of fish and fowl

Alas! The ways of poets are inscrutable.

The ancient city saw her

In the attire of the modernity

One had taken the bowl of his heart

Burning to millions of suns

Light had to be shared

Among the vast millions of men and women

When the first nuclear fission took place

He cried : in the sky is a thousand suns.

When the first poem explodes

He would say:

in the heart are a thousand candles!

Extinguished candles have a white smoke

Candles are bright when lit and extinguished.

The bamboos had an existence in bunch

Separated, a piece would try to sing

Of the bosom whence it had come

The sparrow would fly in the sky

The lover would die there of love.