Musing Down The Memory Lanes Poem by Prateep Sengupta

Now that you have bade good bye
To sixty-seven summers,
And me to fifty nine
Autumn and spring all alike,
Emotions filtered best,
Passions at the bottom lie;
Sedimentation completed long back
Life has completed its futile mission
Nothing now can stir them
To pollute our vision.
And we can stand face to face
Recalling the days
When our friendship was terminated.
It was difficult moment then
But the decision was right
And we know it now.

You were an unsuccessful man, my friend
You had been a day dreamer,
Living in the aesthetic world of art.
You said to me,
When sex is terminated, fatigue rules
But poetry rules over fatigue,
Urdu shers, art and poetry
Shall keep us alive,
In intellectual companionship
Our love shall strive.

You were wrong, my friend
Success is counted not by what you read
Nor what you know or by what you write
But by what you earn
And how much you dare to spend at a stroke
For TV-VCP-Refrigerator and for a
Mercedes car.
When sex is terminated
It is on gold that love survives.

I would have been proud
To call you my friend
If you had a glossy hand
But yours palms were dull
Though, I admit, you had a warm heart.
So I changed my course
I destroyed all the Urdu shers
That you once sent. I gave
My cousin all your manuscript
Stories and verses. You used to sent
Scenery snaps with quotations at the back
And my brother kept them.
Books and pens you presented from time to time
Lost in the busy schedules of life.
Only a draft poem, your Manifesto of love,
Melancholic Nostalgia, snatched my sleep
Kept me in a phobia
I could neither destroy it,
None was there to give it;
It was explicitly implied
What it conveyed
Was impossible to hide.

Should he breathe the smell
Future peace may be at stake.
To him I wanted to be true
Though I may be false to you.
I was frightened, I was gloomy and
Became so silly to give it
To my friend Maithyli.

Now that I’m going through this poem
In the current issue of the Weekly,
My heart throbs as I hear
My grown up son and daughter
Quoting from your verse;
They are crazy about your lines
And fall out often in their bid to reach
Beneath the surface meaning of each.


Now I feel safer, the truth,
None I wish to discover
Maithyli is no more and all your visitors
Have been restricted at the door.
It is the ICCU of Gleneagles,
Waiting to announce
When your dusk with the night mingles.

Now is just a matter of time
None can meet you now
Cold hands that wrote the warm rhyme
Is now ready for its final ride.
With admirers thronged outside.
.

But at times, deep inside I bleed,
Unable to claim who had been behind the verse
That my wards today so eagerly read.
Life was glossy, my eyes dazzled
In those days I could not fathom
That life is a puzzle that
In future may make me blink.