Life in Messy Hastinapur

So many more days will pass
in this weariness, in sorrow.
The eyes with which I search for you,
with which I have scoured the world,
hide so many tears—
thirteen hundred million seas
would seem smaller.
 
I have not walked
to the Bodhi tree of Sarnath,
nor the birthplace of Ram.
In the depths of your eyes
ideals rest immovable—
ancient, severe,
hard as scripture.
 
And still the chest burns,
blood spilling upon
the barren dunes of sorrow,
storms scattering
like endless lines of sand.
In the dense shade of the banyan,
in a tired afternoon,
are you still as beautiful
as I once saw you,
in the city of Janaka?
 
Here I live,
in this city of decay and fire.
Your gentle smile—
a serene hermit by a silver lake.
I have forgotten when I last knew
if I was alive,
or simply entombed
inside my own corpse.
 
This corpse I will drag
like Parthasarathi with his chariot,
like the arrows that rose
from the belly of Bhishma,
toward the shameless cremation grounds of night.
Or like Karna pierced
beneath the wheel of his chariot—
guilty in the crime of crooked truth.
This blood will turn blue,
colder than ice,
bearing from birth all debts and time,
this battered, endangered spirit,
in a weary Hastinapur.
 
I wait for your touch—
as if the golden wand
might brush my head,
as if your hand,
blue lotus in bloom,
might lift me into a fairytale life again.
Look upon me, astonished earth—
otherwise, let it be.
There will be no rising for me.