A million Years

( Edited )

A million Years

On whose shoulders perches the Eagle?

Who mourns through gusts of the eastern rushing winds?

A boy who grew up in dullness couldn't get out of it for the rest of his life

He felt gloomy on all evenings and smiled at the faintest of the raindrops

He saw the decades descend on the great delta and thought he would have a rising too;

The one that would pull him out of the clutches of nights and days

Grief is borne out of grief, he would think, and nothing else happens

So it was, the rising never came

And grief only paved way for further grief

The valley surged with new delights

Newer brigades took over the streets and the palaces

He scribbled and he kept scribbling

To the rise of the valley and the tedium of his own

Everything will pass, he wrote, nothing will remain,

The tree that gave you the shelter

The you that took the shelter

The shelter that gave 

And the act of taking

There isn't a conundrum bigger than a symbol staring at you meaninglessly

There isn't a misery greater than you

You are the life

In you lies the end

He walked along the shores with a peasant's feet

With a smell of the earth in his soul harvested by generations

Toiling and dying in the fields

His hands carried the language of harvests

Through his eyes flew the monsoons

The dreary summers

And the long hopeless waits

Scattered along the earthen roofs

Along the jaded shadows of Neem

We were no warriors

Our king taught us to fight

And so we fight

With our enemies

With our lives and our times

We plow through the fields and raise harvests of gold

He walked by the city that rose to the skies

With a demeanor that mocked him

Ridiculed him

And even threatened him

A glittering settlement of hollow people; with billows of wealth rising from its trenches

Her dazzling, sky high edifices

Shone deep in to the pupils of his eyes

Blinding him

Pushing him back

Mauling him, crushing him to death

This isn't the place for me, he thought  I belong to the wild

to the forests and fields and the hills

and the river that flows through my heart

the path traversing the planes of faraway lands

where truth lays scattered in feathers

of slain birds; of drained seas

in to the cold of dark grey blossoms;

the sounds sublime

 Who am I, my beloved, he sighed

 to the skies, to the waters, to the winds

 Where am I headed for ?

 Decades have gone by and he hasn't reached anywhere

 and the Godavari, she has flown past another million years..

--

Anant Dhavale