Words in the dust...

We had missed the beauty of that twilight.
The twilight of mystical colours and earthly hopes.
The raucous birds had hovered over the river Brahmaputra.
And sunset had lingered on the sky like an old confused person.
I had waited at the same place, alone and forlorn.
And the dying light had wrapped around me, softly,
like my favourite pashmina shawl... like a shroud.
I saw the breathless wind stop its game and rest
in the dry winter grasses and dusty benches.

And sometimes the shadows of the evening trees whispered about some tale
Where hearts had met in the fields drenched with magnesium moonlight.
When love and desires had whirled and swirled in a hot sultry night.
And a Midas hand had turned life into a dream and the dreams so alive.

But tales like this fit only in a fictional story
where things always end happily.
For love, if that is its name, was crushed under the feet along with the dry leaves that day.
And the promise of “walking together come what may” was left unsaid.
And the defeated sun had yielded to a pall of thick darkness.

You had already left, left to be someone else’s.
And now I know I will miss the beauty of all the twilights.

  

(Published in The Assam Tribune as a series of poems titled Melancholy Moods)