Last Song

The song sung
under the shadow of the last sky,
trapped beneath the ashes
of burnt threads of time
and few lonely hearts
that stopped beating.

I knew what you were saying
but surely I knew wrong.
I heard what the world was saying
but surely I heard wrong.
The mistakes of my music
hidden by the blue veil of night.

And you are lonely…
While I lose myself in pointless poems
The words entangling and suffocating you
In a mesh of senseless sound.
As, you struggle…I watch
And immerse in my last poem as if it’s my first

The world appears hard for you…
Deserted in the darkest of winters
And, here in the moon-swept rooftop
of the forsaken mansion
I wish I could share my fears.
And, as you go behind the horizon
I write yet another song
of another dawn in the world we left behind.

This dance is yours as much as mine
And as we let the music wash over us
like the disrespectful waves
on the majestic shores.
I sacrifice myself every time
as if it’s my first.

The strength that made me weak
Left me waiting in the world of words.
Shivering, waiting for your blanket
To be hidden in your arms.
Time has come to break free again
Freedom bought at the cost of my last song
The song written in tribute to my first.

Rain Messenger's Diary 8...Death Watch

Waiting for the last breath to part as everyone waits for the inevitable is a feeling that no one might understand before actually experiencing it. The pallor of death lies low on the faces and the walls and everyone except the person concerned seems to be terribly agitated.

This most unlikely vigil is what I experienced when I was called to be present at the deathbed of a distant relative as was expected of me since I was now considered “grown up”. I felt sickened at the expressions of the people there…I could feel the hidden current almost a bated breath expectation of death so that all necessary preparations of a funeral could be initiated. I had never felt so cold, it was as if the life of that person had ceased to matter as if the transition from ‘she’ to ‘it’, ‘a person’ to ‘a body’ had already been made and all that was left was the irrelevant detail of actually taking that final step. What was more irritating was she didn’t seem in any hurry to take that step. How very inconsiderate…doesn’t she know it’s a weekday, people have to return to their offices and their respective run of the mill rat races? Nobody had all the time in the world.

They say one shouldn’t talk of death as it bodes ill but then what about that collective unsaid death wish for the person who was once the home maker and was now so annoyingly holding up all the work that needed to be done after she died.

As, everyone showed up they shook her and called her as if to wake up their own spirits and just pat them back to sleep while telling them “we did our duty”........the endless roll-call of “Jethima…ami…ami Swapan”, “Jethima..ami…ami Gadai” and so on and so forth made me want to throw up. It was the ‘society’ and the ‘social fibre’ that we are so proud of laid bare for me to see. They had come…as was expected, as was proper and civil.

Why the hypocrisy, I don’t know but nobody minded. Nobody wanted to celebrate the life that was spent, no one reflected on it. Everyone concentrated on the death and the inevitability and helplessness of it. No one cared for life for there was no human being in that room just mortals doing what they were “supposed” to do.

Then…she died.