Of All the Poems I Have Written

Today, when I logged in to write something, only one man came to my mind - the one whom I could not win after chasing him for six years, the one who labelled me as a frustrated soul and the one for whom I committed such a blunder that will keep on jeopardizing my life forever.

I’m quite comfortable in writing peanut-size paragraphs in blogs as my impatience does not allow me to hang on further, but today I thought of writing a poem instead – which I usually write very rarely because I’m a connoisseur of nitpicking the rhyming words. The fact is, rare subject matters turn people poetic at times even when there is no poetic instinct inherently running within them. And one such groovy subject matter is “Love’s labor’s lost”. Today, I tried multiple times to write, but every time I scribbled few lines, I had to delete or rephrase those, because I thought I was missing out something. Or, may be, I was just not content with my words or lines or the meaning they were projecting together! Or, may be, my mind actually did not want to focus on that stale subject cob-webbing that stale person anymore! Suddenly the tube light in my room began to flicker furiously – like a moth fluttering its wings to live again when entrapped in a lizard’s mouth. I put a pause on my writing, and went ahead to switch off the light. Then I switched it on again. After three-four pairs of switch on-and-switch off and a gradually dwindled seesawing for ten minutes, I could attune it to make it steady. And the tube light started to glow more brightly than ever.

Afterwards when I came back to write again, I started retrospecting something funny from my past. I wrote my first full length poem probably at the age of eighteen when I was in twelfth standard. It was also about unrequited love. Perhaps my second full length poem was also an aftermath of similar massacre when I was twenty, a sophomore in college and a sudden-discoverer of some hidden relationship between my heartthrob and a beautiful woman. I could not recollect the backdrop of my third/fourth/fifth or onward full length poems because my volatile memory would have lost the track if it had to travel through that vulnerable maze, but I could well guess that those backdrops must have borne resemblance with earlier tragedies. 


I tried to connect the dots between all the poems I have written and the broken things in my life. The fragments of old memories helped me to resuscitate an old poem - "An Ode to Broken Things" written by Pablo Neruda. I re-googled that poem today and sniffed out voraciously not only pathos, but also an implicit resilience slumbering behind all the words. I have a little doubt whether Pablo ever had a visit to Calcutta in his lifetime or not, if he had ever done that, he must have witnessed immersion of 'durga' idol into the rivers when puja festival ends.  Thousands of idols get immersed through the water in order to take part in the process of salvation and reconstruction; and in the immediate next year new idols get made out of that reconstructed clay only, bearing the seeds of earlier broken pieces of the immersed idols.


All fragile things are supposed to be broken one day and heart is not an exception. Again, all broken things are meant to get fastened someday and heart is also not an exception. I do not know what happened to those broken pieces of glasses when the plate broke or the lamp fell in that poem by Pablo, but I guess, today those pieces are being treated as precious relics, studded in some beautifully stained mosaic in a palatial wall to bear evidence of the fact that reconstruction is the immediate next step after encountering a breakage. I amazed, if I also have the potentiality to reconstruct my broken things in life or not. And soon I discovered, I just did that today, few minutes back. I could restore the light again despite an episode of disturbing flicker during its low voltage phase. I wove a dream. Some day, all the poems I have written would take the form of a piece of prose in order to reconstruct, relive and shine through all the cutting edges formed while enduring the process of breakage.