Waiting for a New Dawn

Under a tree she sat frozen,           

braving the brutal cold wind.

Face full of creases and wrinkles,

mind, of undying old melancholies.

Victim of Time’s constant blows

a vegetable had she become, with

matted hair, trembling hands and empty mind.

 Looking out for the last sun-set,

she was out there waiting  and moaning,

tending the scars of her life.

 Broken long was her mirror of memory

making her a hapless, rootles recluse.

Thro the splinters, she still saw

the splendors that once glowed her home,

her mom filling harmony around her,

feeding her, nursing her and adoring her.

Nights saw her mom a singing Koel,

when she chanted munificent lilts.

So soft and soft, so sweet and sweet,

it made her sleep an insouciant sleep.

 ‘Mother gone to god’, said her dad,

when, on a wintry morn, she woke up.

Motherless, she felt life a real drag;

 only void and vacuum around her.

Ever hearing mom’s sweet lilts in ears

she began walking the hard terrains of life

with a father who soon brought home a new wife.

A wife, ever tending his libido, drove

from home all memories of dear mom

 made it morally askew and abominable.

 Alone and abandoned on dad’s death,

she grew up in a farm away from home

toiling out all through day

 to keep the pangs of hunger at bay.

Living lonely in a lust-strewn world

she had nocturnal animals

crawling around her forever.

 ’ What is husband?’

she moaned, lying awake during nights.

‘Will I have one’? she thought thro tears.

 Floating on the dark ocean of life,

a wastrel she had become with no man

ever ready to give her a Wedding Bliss.

Feeling like the moon gleaming on a desert

she wept and wept for a husband;

wept and wept for a baby-girl whom she’d

like to carry on her shoulders and

sing to her mom’s old soothing lilts,

so soft and soft, so sweet and sweet,

to make the baby sleep an insouciant sleep.

 She sat frozen under a tree

Braving brutal cold winds.

 Face full of creases and wrinkles,

Mind, of dark old melancholies.

Victim of Time’s constant blows

a vegetable she had become at eighty with

matted hair, trembling hands and empty mind.

When a derelict became life, calling no shots;

When shattered dreams putting out her hopes

She, the incorrigible, was still there, squatting

and

Waiting for a New Dawn.

[The Art of Living presupposes that we’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen. A tenacious one will wait for a New Dawn even when he/she has one foot out in the limbo.]

Image Courtesy: Google