He was born broken; one of a kind, A scarecrow one can find Here and there with splintered limbs Taught to always be half blind He was afraid even being undead As if everything he never said Can be heard through the silence Warring inside his uneven head
His name he remembered still Amen; meaning to fulfil But there were ashes in his waistcoat Of people he hurt but forgot to heal So he ran and walked and also crawled Eyes wide for one who had solved How a caterpillar in the end In a butterfly gets evolved
Days he spent in the random heat With shivering hands and on hobbling feet And at night he sought strangers known Who could tell where few roads meet And on bed made of carpet and cold He laid his flesh when it could no more hold The dreams of being young again When the promises were getting old
And in the morning, midst the fallen dew He thought of his life when it all was new Now what he has was being taken away When he already had so few But as the sun climbs its ladder high He marches once more to relive the lie Believing same as Icarius Wearing feathers would make him fly
And even today you can catch his glimpse The old man, who begs and limps, Through the mirror of mortal minds He is the maker of all the hymns One who tosses the coin for sun and rain The progeny of unrequited pain Hear his heartbeat as your own And in your vein his name: Amen.
I remember once when a friend shared his experience of reading one particular poem that left him buzzing in his ears as though to grasp the totality of it.
I can feel the same rush, that same buzzing sound coursing through my veins right now. The poem rises like a crescendo and gracefully ends like an echo in the readers’ ears…. as if it has left the readers to ponder, to swim in the familiarity, almost like a first-hand experience, that he experienced in the opening stanzas but midway…it leaves the readers fighting the overwhelming scooping of his entirety…but the verse doesn’t stop for the reader, just like time, I might say…it goes on leaving the reader behind gasping for air.. It launches into something much, much larger than the philosophy itself. Almost godly.
Jeez, I’ve read you for so many years but I still am more than often surprised by what you can achieve through your art. I always find my own story in your writings, and yet, YET I feel so left behind, so inexperienced, so small in front of your poems.
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