Pages

The heart rages—
and so comes fear,
true fear.
Every day I turn
the page of words,
never thinking,
as long as I live,
that these pages
would carry the weight
of living itself.
The thoughts that once
made me forget,
drowned me
in the net of illusion,
in the flood of speech—
now leave me
exhausted, silent,
motionless.
I fall away
from the grandeur of nature,
into the indifference of Dostoevsky.
Is this what it means to live—
wordless letters
rushing endlessly,
carrying dreams of a new day,
promising to save the world
from the hands of the ignorant?
They go to seek shelter
in a certain sage—
one Karl Marx, sir.
And fear—only fear—
that in thirty-four years
on the soil of Bengal,
these pages have fallen,
and still I never thought
this would be called life.
With the civilization of man
we must decorate
the white pages of Das Kapital,
leaving behind
whatever is human—
feeling,
in the afterlife
of moral emptiness.
And so the scholars return,
filtering thought
through Lenin’s terror.
Perhaps one day
someone will kick
the backside of these wise men,
just a little emotional,
and say to the pages:
don’t give us knowledge,
give us devotion—
so we may wash our eyes,
and finally see
what is truly human.