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Mar 12, 2012

Incandescent Dichotomy

This one's a little long. We were on our way back from camps and at the train station, I looked up to the sky to the sight shown below. For a strange moment, it triggered a lot of suppressed emotions that I've explored in this poem.



A radiating lamp in the night sky,
It watched over us like a mother
And year after year, we've watched
The dark of the night it tried to smother.

I saw the moon as an open book,
Blackened with dust and age,
Pages yellowed by the tinge of memories
Of billions of people filled with rage.

It watched the wars, the world's plight,
And comforted dying soldiers at night;
It watched the theories of science evolve
As the face of our planet continued to revolve.

There was a time when it saw
The face of Cleopatra smiling at its white body,
A time when it scanned the face of the dying children
In the Holocaust, shielded from everybody;
An era when it saw Cro-Magnon man
Transform to homo sapiens with time,
Those millennia when the dinosaurs died
It saw their plight with amusement sublime.

A silent spectator, a selfish celestial entity,
It stood silent as the world changed for the worse
It watched us rob Mother Nature of her wealth
None of which can we ever reimburse.

It's hands are spattered with the screams of the dead,
The triumphant roars of the winners
And the indifferent sighs of the crowd
Most composed of ardent sinners.

Historians with humped backs and grey hair
Devote lifetimes to analysis of text,
But if only they looked at the moon
They would see the history of our people there.

Murderers, thieves, dictators beware--
The moon's eyes have watched you all along.
And though, like a God, it might simply sit back and stare
It saw you as you subjected your society to wrong.

But beggars, well-wishers, do-gooders in all right
The moon watched you suffer and cry
But to save you from your undeserving plight
It did not even try.

------

It was 4 o'clock in the evening and the sky was red
The sun a jewel hanging low in the expanse of colour overhead
But when I looked back, a dense, dark blanket muffled all colour
The night sky stank of the evil and the dead.

Clouds flew with the wind and white bathed the sky,
The light of the moon brought comfort to human life
And for an instant when I watched it intently
I could see the history of man - the triumphs and the strife.

An open book, an incandescent dichotomy,
Once a child's object of fascination
I saw you as a treasured permanence of my life
But now you seem so dark, evoking an eerie sensation.

Watch me as I make my history,
And my progress as you marked our pathbreakers'.
Laugh at my degeneration,
And ignore my desperation.

;;

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