M.Kaul
Eyes unhappy to focus deeply on anything,
Legs performing their duty nonchalantly,
A pulsating shadow of pain in torso,
Body fighting to leave behind a harsh day’s fatigue,
Mind restaging its arsenals to combat a spiritual wearying,
A gallant beginning in the morning is fading dismally,
A day in human life is ending.
Day in and day out human life
Must go through the rough worldly grind.
Human spirit must percolate through the jagged sieve
Before it can dream of glory.
Each emotion must be expended to survive,
Each thought committed to keep out of troubles.
An inflamed spirit, a sublime soul, an inspired mind,
Experience the sharp angularities of the world –
Its crassness, its insensitivity, its unsophistication.
We must fall in mud before we can look up stars,
A moment of bliss is entwined with a thousand miseries,
We must die a thousand times
Before we are toughened to hold a faith.
The world moves like a clockwork.
Each person aspires for power,
Each person pursues material goals.
Happiness and acquisitions are considered the same.
The ensuing insecurity is bottomless,
The mirage of happiness is chasing an ever receding horizon.
Human life is wasted in its daily chores,
Progress of worldly life a blinding illusion.
To make a house on the bridge of life
Is the most perverse plan.
What is spiritual in essence
Can not be secured in a material edifice.
I fall on the craggy edges of life
And ache with seething pain.
I tremble and murmur:
Is that what is human life?
I wonder if God had meant that we live the way we do,
Or is it our illusion, our fallacy?
I look through my window
At the verdant sheen outside,
Speckled with the majesty of trees touching the zenith,
I see the sinuous curves of a rivulet on the horizon,
I feel the infinite and the resplendent blue of the sky.
When the mosaic of colored leaves
Dance down to ground in fall,
Uncovering the stark and inner beauty of trees,
They point to the spirit behind,
The master’s invisible hands.
Never at rest,
Never far away from human perception.
Aloft a silent salubrious evening,
Gliding over its serene mystery,
Rests the spirit of eternity,
The call of the unknown.
A point of light in the darkness,
Masked often by the material world.
When you recede from the world
You walk into the lap of nature –
The eternal mother.
It has beauty, principles, and truth.
You become nature when you give yourself to it.
It is a life where all the quests end.
