Out of Site, Out of Mind!
Distant Past.
a ‘Twitter-dm’ mythological+nature poem with the instinctive and artistic Vaghawan Ojha.
When we were old, in a distant past
We used to sing chores with the swans,
By the shore of the Narcissus-drowned lake.
And when the wild dreams of evening started dancing
the mourn of fading sun,
We used to contemplate the crimson images
Of our own time,
The young and blooming one
Where we laughed under the jasmine shrubs,
Oblivious of what time could take away
From our souls.
And the hysteria left us with a darkened core,
And a moment’s freedom. As soon the world strike us,
Launched from Atlas' arms
We were prostrated with the reality and our youth weighing tons.
We bathed beneath the rain of nostalgia,
And walked like wounded birds of merciless winter hail,
Waited for life
To spring the joyful death;
But we were yet to count
Endless seasons of life,
Which must have been decayed away
In the suffering of reminiscence
Which giggled hard like a devil,
To make both of us cry in the lonely rain.
Rain blotted our pain, tears, wet faces,
It rained on. We dripped on, people kept passing by,
Time waits for none. What healing’s to time, we to love
I meant life; love; life
It’s all the same and it is nothing alike,
I bit from Eris' twig, and tongued from Lethe’s mud.
We faltered among the graves of gods and divines,
Thinking that it must be a sin,
Which had wounded us to a living corpse;
Praying all the verses made of so-called phrases
That must have been written by some lunatics,
As wounded as like us,
But the tenacious suffering itself
Was as divine as the silent light of the night
That only lover had discovered,
And we suffered the same melancholy,
And we lived the same murmuring calmness
And found that the sin was the only religion
That we could trust on,
Because that was love.
And they are not just the games of the weekends,
These sins we live by, these loves that live us
Are life now. They are we. Lost or found. Given up or snatched away. Finding out that there’s no heaven nor hells
No eternal super-man, or Maleficents. Just us humans,
And Psyche’s suitor’s arrow dissecting right through our clayed up masks,
Vanity and humanized acts that perpetuate us, along with itself.
Finding us was like
A revelation of mist for winter,
One dawned with another
And decayed together
When we both were strangled
Inside the cage of time,
In a story called life;
Little did we know,
the difference between clouds and sky
Because we had only walked in swamp,
Without ever seeing what’s a river is like,
Like a newborn bird,
We found ourselves together
Hiking among the branches
Chirping, laughing, singing,
Because that was the time
We had found ourselves
In the unfathomable deepness of our solitude,
But now we wish for a dementia in the sheer loneliness,
Because even a joyful memory hunt us back,
As if life want the payback cheque for the joy
That we had found together.
And that summer sweat us
Like risen from the swimming pool of time,
Memories and moments under gravity’s reign
And so did our desires, our innocence and dreams
And like a pair of Aphrodites, we foamed out of that ‘sea’.
Each chirp of summer bird
Turned into your song,
While I sat on the
Same age old rocker chair,
Living and dying with
The rising tides of our reminiscence,
The ebb of life had no direction
But only one destiny,
And that was where we belonged.
The earth has decayed since then,
The seasons have vanished since then,
Countless life have turned into muds since then,
Countless clouds have died since then,
But we seem immortal,
Inside our will, and un-will.
And we keep on living, as loves, as love flowers,
Metamorphosed by gods trying to curb their guilt,
We’ll float as constellations 'bove clouds after midnights
We’ll stain the grass as ancient anemone
We’ll love beyond life, by the shores of the Styx, penniless
And will neglect these loveless shades passing by.
We must sweep with the summer stream,
And slumber in the shade of autumn,
To crumble with the wilt of winter together,
In spring, we will have already lived a life
Without a regret,
Humming the hums of life,
We will sleep under the same shroud,
And when we sing the final stanza,
Even death can’t humiliate us,
Of our distant past.
A person whose words feel so fresh each time you’d read them, and yet I don’t know why I didn’t read them as frequently as I must have; I mean I can’t blame all of it to Medium’s shitty newsfeed; though I did follow him from the very first day I read his poem, yet in his own words “I stumbled on his poems” rarely…I really can’t explain why. Though soon I came to realize that I need to read more of Vaghawan’s poetry, so I took the long way to visit his words via going through his profile page, but totally worth it. And soon, thanks to Indira’s and Tamyka’s this amazing idea, I got to collab with him which I now realize I’ve always wished for. It’s like when you read some writer/poet, you quickly know it that they could teach you so much, and you’d do anything to interact/work along with them. V makes into this list of poets very easily. His poems have this raw essence of nature; believe me when I say it, and if you don’t, take a look of be it just a single stanza and you’d agree that it’s fluent in his writings. And must I tell you, he doesn’t make an effort to write this way! It’s natural in him…. the nature’s soul that drips from his words; and how do I know it? well, the poem above helped me realize it, and I shouldn’t have been much astonished when he said he thought we were supposed to go “book-long” with the poem, because he could and was about to. I had to break the flow, maybe because I am not that able now, maybe, and probably because not only I ran out of myths to incorporate in the poem, but of words too. So sadly this had to end at 4 mins, though I positively hope to do more collabs with him, sooner rather than later. A poet so natural, and extraordinaire. Oh, and one more thing: his name, Vagahawan means god in Hindi.
