The Autumn of Love

Every year while celebrating the arrival of spring the chords of emotion create ripples through my veins. Today the sea besides me has turned silent. I lay hidden on the boulders besides it with questions galore. The evening is hidden somewhere behind the sea. Darkness isn't far away. It is a matter of few moments. Life has brought me here at a new pedestal in haste. Just as the evening sets in every passing minute, autumn seems to have set in life. The process of detachment has begun. All this while I thought I was in consistent never ending attachment. Now, I remain in waiting for the tide of time to return.

I stare at the melancholy around the sea. Strange shadows seem to be running on these boulders where I sit. In search of a soul. The lost soul of the body. Perhaps, I see my own reflection. My eyes cannot match the pace of the running shadows. I float effortlessly like a bird lost in the vast skyline of desire!

 

It is an unannounced journey far away from home. In an unknown land of dreams two hours away from the land of reality where I remained in exile all these last twenty two years. In exile, every shelter is home. I remain in exile, at home!

The separation has left me sleepless. I am like a wandering shadow in love. Shadows have a short life span. They die much before an opportunity to clench hands of the beloved till eternity. Shadow is dead before turning at the fork on the road. The fork for which I waited has disappeared in a sweet fragrance. A girl named love is lost. Lost she is. Before those hands could meet to rest forever in union!

Those eyes understand love. The echoes of my silent heart reflecting in them. Her face like a fairy. Smile as a tender flower. I wonder how many rebirths will it take to find my lost beloved?

The lifeless shell on the sea shore shook me from this solitude! Only to become a catalyst in itself!

I want to turn the wheels of time. And, scream before the world, to get me the one who is lost. The one who let me drown in the depth of the sparkling eyes of faith. The kohl eyes!

Like that poet who is a phoenix writing his last song longing for love before being consumed by the flames of his own fire! I see my own reflection in the phoenix.

In such times when I weep for the lost beloved through the gloomy night, Shiv Kumar Batalvi, the phoenix above, gives me solace.  

In the 'Pinch of Separation' (translation into English of the song 'Maae Nii Maae') he says:

My songs are like eyes
That sting with the grains of separation.
In the middle of the night ,
They wake and weep for dead friends.
Mother, I cannot sleep!

Soaked in perfume,
But the pain does not recede.
I foment them
With warm sighs,
Yet they turn on me ferociously.

And need guidance myself.
Who can advise him?
Mother, would you tell him,
To clench his lips when he weeps,
Or the world will hear him cry.

Tell him, mother, to swallow the bread
Of separation.
He is fated to mourn.
Tell him to lick the salty dew
On the roses of sorrow,
And stay strong.

Who are the snake handlers
From whom I can get another skin?
Give me a cover for myself.
How can I wait like a jogi
At the doorstep of these people
Greedy for gold?

Listen, o my pain,
Love is that butterfly
Which is pinned forever to a stake.
Love is that bee,
From whom desire,
Stays miles away.

Love is that palace
Where nothing lives
Except for the birds.
Love is that hearth
Where the colored bed of fulfillment,
Is never laid.

Mother, tell him not to
Call out the name of his dead friends
So loudly in the middle of the night.
When I am gone, I fear
That this malicious world,
Will say that my songs were evil.

Mother, o mother
My songs are like eyes
That sting with the grains of separation.
In the middle of the night ,
They wake and weep for dead friends.
Mother, I cannot sleep!