Love's Travails Poem by JIBAN GOSWAMI

Love’s travails

Moonbeams try by night
to suck away the fragrance of jasmine
dismayed, weep dew drops
before vowing to try again.

Love’s rhythms breach night’s silence
with clinking bangles and tinkling anklets
as sighs escape from an estranged wife
smitten by love unrequited
her tears of despair fall like beads of glass
that her truant lover might have called,
she wistfully thinks,
a gleaming string of pearls

Swans’ cotton-white wings
gliding over virgin snow,
white as the foam of
freshly drawn milk
cast a fleeting shadow,
ghostly and dark as sin:
reminding one of the
dark despair blackening
the peach and cream
of a jealous maiden’s
alabaster skin

The winter’s river
slim and demure like a shy maiden
turn with the onset of monsoon
into a lusty love-starved vixen
rushing with frothy waves
to cascade over cataracts and dales
driven by unbridled lust
she goes berserk
till she can douse her lust
by mating with the ocean’s waves.