Down the blazing trail of barren sands I walked, in utter defiance of the world’s disdain towards people of honest worth.
Thoughts ranging from childhoold innocence to venerable old age, passing through youthful exuberance, family joys and sorrows, all drifted simultaneously into oblivion as the sands bestowed upon me showers of welcome into this lonely land. But my thoughts drifted only to bounce back….
Annoyed at the monotony of life, I had taken this decisive step of seeking solace in solitude. Solitude is bilss, Wordsworth had said. But thoughts of the world I was born in, the world I grew up in, the world of people I was moving away from, never really departed from my mind. I felt a clear isolation between the body and my mind, solitude was only a mirage….
The sun dipped low and gradually darkness crept in giving vent to my silent anger. All my sincere strife to free myself from the envelope of worldly thoughts surrounding me was in vain. Mental repose was totally ruled out. Poetry, short and sweet, and the poetic world, was my only hope. I let loose my vagabond mind.
I said to myself, poetry is immortal and needs no rejuvenation – unlike the Phoenix, the bird rejunvenated from the burnt ashes. I was the world and the world was me as poetry took control of my mind.
I trod on unwalked paths and walked on the repeatedly trod; on lands unseen and rare, lands in my memory bare – the lands the poets took me to. Shakespeare and Milton, Byron and Shelley, Wordsworth and Keats, streamed across my horizon telling me tales of love and life, valor and death, Nature and man. The melancholy seen in life and the symphony heard abundantly in Nature took me into realms of bounteous truth; and a missionary zeal invaded my mind.
Miles of sand stretched behind me. At last, I reached a serene oasis. My sweating body longed for water and my tongue perspired in eager expectation. I bent down, and my glasses dropped off my nose. I was blind. I dived, struggled and came out gasping for breath. Wiping my face, I put on my glasses. I regained my lost vision. The haze before me gradually drifted away….
I realized my folly of being blind to reality. But still, I wait for the lonely night to converse with the poets to whom I write as I see the dawn of dusk:
You speak volumes
in your still silence
while I waste words talking nothing.
I realized it at last.
And now,
When I want to talk sense
I go to my table and
Write a silent verse.