The Unfinished Poem

From village unto city,
along the wide road’s edge,
treading the clay-worn pavement for hours in a single breath,
he at last arrived by the shadow of the railway station.
By the tall electric wires that mark the path one may travel,
he followed the unseen road toward nowhere,
for the heart was neither in city nor in village.
The metallic roar came rushing,
like a living giant of iron and smoke,
to carry away a mind already severed from its ties,
to leave it at some unfamiliar doorway in the suburbs.
With trembling hands he stirred the papers of poems once written,
their life-force stolen,
their bodies destroyed by death,
so many tears had drained his strength,
yet the pages had never been gathered whole.
And for those unfinished leaves, he peered through strange shutters,
asking—who abides in this house?
With the burden of weariness upon his head,
with sweat and blood wasted along the road of life,
he searched and searched for the familiar dwelling—
was it here, upon this very street?
But memory’s fragments only veil the past,
and no door opens.
Have the lips of his poetry grown numb,
that after so many years of leaving village for city,
this was the last sight awaiting him—
a single unpaid debt?
The house by the station,
the notebook of poems,
the sharp-tongued debates in Hari’s tea stall,
where youth was boundless and days overflowed—
who knows of them now, in this present hour?
Is there anyone left inside the house,
to be found, to be asked after,
to be told that life yet remains?
But at the station courtyard,
at Hari’s tea stall, he found no one.
In the world of time politics shifts,
history and geography themselves are altered,
nothing stands still—
who then shall remain immortal?
Yet hope had whispered:
surely he might find again the torn page,
the third leaf of that long poem
he had left behind
in the yellowed pocket of a worn cotton vest.
He had thought, one day he would return it,
bring back the rhyme,
restore the unfinished poem—
so that life itself need not remain half-written.
But at the door no one stands;
perhaps this house is not that house at all.
And memory’s fragments veil the past,
but no door opens.