738
THE SOLDIER’S WIFE She is wrapped in the purity of a bone-white sari forehead bare hands disbangled eyes emptied of sleep, darkened with sooty half moons below try a word with his unfading smile hanged on the wall a sea of despair trickles down drenching the meanings of her past and the hidden suns of the future. The reminiscent voices of her lost soul pound the breath of hope suffocating the debris of tragedy in the engulfing darkness, where the hands of her deprivation burry the last dawn as the eternal sunset sets in. Two kids! one still at breast the other at the kindergarten haunted everyday with the question “where’s your dad?” on the weekend parents’ meet. The government paltry sum, her bread, body the space, children the solace, mirror the reflection of time in the narrowness of sultry void. The other day the nation honoured her Paramveerachakra, a perpetual barb of distinguished honour. Fate’s artful hand drew her down into a wary future. Today he’s a grand memory a helmet-headed gun on a tomb of his body and she’s a half drawn distorted sketch of silence abandoned by an invisible artist, who contemplates an apocalyptic erasure. TALK TO SILENCE a time to keep silence, and a time to speak Ecclesiastes 3:7 for we are only those fleeting echoes strung by its luminescent hands, those cricket-chirrups, no more when its eye breaks the darkness. As the tired hands of the Earth’s clock also long now to hold its hand, let meditations melt, down our eyes day and night into that sublime tree, the unbroken branches of which bore our stinking nests. Let’s eat the bread of that dead wheat grain in the Earth to live, and our breath stick like magnetite to become one, anew, so talk in the midnight sack-clothed to gather its light till words are emptied out of flesh and suffused into it at the estuary of that communion where meanings are born again as microscopic scales of its light from weird pupation, flitting for its enlightening nectar.
