In Search Of Identity... Poem by Dr. Baishali Bhaumik Mitra

The mirror in my room isn’t just the same anymore!
Now it has many faces,
myriad visages and countenances.
They all stare back;
some with the innocence of an autumnal rainfall,
some as bleak and pale as the opaque moon,
a few as uncertain as an overcast sky,
yet another hissing bright like serpent eyes,
and one, ghostly and shadowy looming from behind,
one more perched in a corner
like an inky frozen wave of a thick dark ocean.

Faces that the mirror bury within
are at times natural and at another,
masks slapped upon so hard
that it fastens undying.
My mirror has hands too!
Several hands of known, unknown memories
of half-baked dreams and half-heart efforts
that keep strangulating my soul!

Yet on a fertile rainy day
those broken reflections are like
powder showers of pastel blue color
or may be like a moon-washed drizzle
of an unforgettable dusk,
making me sob for the lost innocence.

They create a halo around me
like the haze of several pin points of fire flies,
and often, through those fragments
a faint echo of old melodies
flow down through the alley of the past,
beacons and then retreats again!

Then, time and again,
the mirror would disintegrate
and fall apart and splinter all around,
like a broken relationship
and I will struggle tiptoeing around the house!

The mirror is dead long ago!
Half of her died the day she tried to search for love
and the other half perished with her efforts to belong.
Yet it is funny how
her stubborn wild mind keeps trying to abscond
from her brittle existence that is
as fragile as promises and hope,
and persists searching for her authentic face
and lurks to live as if she’s immortal!