Prologue
In the evening of life
he walks the well-loved ways and by-ways
of his enquiring Self
to comprehend the whys and wherefores
of his swift rise and fall:
I
In the bloom of youth
the sun rose in the East to foster
and nurture his growth
until in its breath-taking lustre
he stood ten feet tall.
II
Drenched by the rays of the refulgent,
indulgent eye of day,
he was at high noon lord and master
of his Cosmos, potent
with the promise of unrestrained, nay
untamed, boundless power!
III
But brilliance anon transmuted to
a hard, brittle light
which he kidded himself was the real
McCoy, then - as now -
being too proud (and frightened!) to admit
even to his soul
that what was, was no longer; what seemed
immutable was doomed
to the tyranny of unredeemed
decay and desuetude.
IV
The shimmering haze of the languid,
anguished afternoon
presaged the waning of his great gift:
his Muse deserted
him for no obvious reason, and soon
he found himself left
alone to bemoan his Fate. For had
he not at the full
height of his earthly glory summoned
Nature to his aid
and betimes bent her back to his will?
V
As the shadows lengthened
athwart his life-course, a resolve grew
firm within him that he
intellectually not be reckoned
a cripple: even now,
uncharted regions of his keenly
questing Ego beckoned
him on to open up a whole new
field of philosophy.
PART THE SECOND
I
It was an evening such as this; an
evening peopled by shy
young lovers, hiding - and secreting -
themselves (from plebeian
stares of inquisitive passersby!)
amid the sheltering
friendly, foliage of bowery haunt
or flowering shrub. He
strolled pensively, while the horizon
purpled in the Orient
and glowed ember-like - in memory
of the day just past - in
the Occident. He gazed at the gaunt
limbs of nim - leafless -
etched starkly against crepusculous
chromes brushed by the Supreme
Artist ahead of the gathering gloom.
II
And he saw with a heart-ache that chaste
bare-limbed tree borne down by
serried ranks of big, rapacious birds.
A shiver ran down his spine. Downcast
he moved on. Then, skywards
a sliver of silver caught his eye!
III
There atop a marbled,
finely-wrought stair-tower, luminescing
whitely, hung the crescive
moon. In that ambient
twilight the magical scene played quaint
tricks on his optic nerve
and he believed he was witnessing
the groping of Man - led
through the medium of a minaret -
towards the Finite, set
like a rare jewel in the velvet
box of the Infinite.
IV
The ornamental lake at his feet
reflected a collage
of ethereal fragments, In fact,
the inverted image
invested him with an unreal sense
of otherworldliness -
a mirage that foreshadowed the fear
of the unknown future.
V
The coolth of a vesperal breeze fans his
cheeks, and softly kisses
the aqueous mirror midst wafting reeds.
This innocent act breeds
series of regimented, rhyming
ripples which - gathering
momentum - animate our still-life
picture. It becomes rife
with movement, up and down, to a fore-
ordained rhythm, but no more
than a fraction later the pattern
is syncopated in-
trusively by a minnow - glistening
for a moment - as it
breaks the surface into widening
circles of wavelets that
splash intermittently on the moss-
girdled verge. But alas!
His elusive, illusory view
of our world is shattered
by the backwash of bubbles into
microscopic, coloured
dots of the pointillist's optic art.
VI
And that fateful night
he began his treatise on short-lived
matters which he called
"Ephemeral Thoughts". He wrote like one
possessed right throughout
the hours of darkness, and as the first
pale fingers of dawn
stretched across the yawning Eastern sky
his pen poised awry
over the last page of manuscript
to compress his thoughts
of a lifetime on love and death in
an apt aphorism.
VII
Suddenly, his half-open window
lit up as the sun
streamed into the attic room bestrewn
with books, books and more
books, and the casements of his mind were
illumined at the same
precious moment with blinding clarity.
Epilogue
And he wrote: "Love is
God's great myst'ry - inevitable
as death - but death is
God's great morning, lighting up the Sky."
Ephemeral
Thoughts 