( 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
