Morning Star Poem by Ananta Madhavan

Sometimes I lie partly awake, much adrift
In a land I knew, but alien this time.
I take a dozen paces to the balcony
To sniff the chilly dawn, but I wrap
A tattered scarf around my neck,
A little loosely, to avoid the end
Of a lady down the vale, who was strangled
By her own sari or by two horrid hands.

The dark and permeating light contend
To erase the dark night without star patterns.
I cannot see the horizon's holy hill.
A pallid crescent moon is perhaps in descent
Far behind the hovels of the suburb.

The morning star, is it really Venus,
Really a solar planet like my home-ground?
The universe has myths beyond my ken.
I must go back to sleep. We have our own
Sleep-trance of living and our regimen.

Each one has a lifetime in disconnected segments,
Some statistics of seconds, hours, days,
To reel through the tracts of moments,
A sequence of trance or transience,
A dream-life it may be, a smidgen
Of what we imagined life-world to be;
Each one, blighted or benighted,
Assumed it was consequence reserved for us.

The morning star has gone, perhaps to return
This evening when random galaxies of city lights
Sparkle and smudge the dark.