Conversations with Life
~ Deepak Vohra
O Life,
what are you, after all?
I still haven’t understood you.
Sometimes you look
a difficult poem,
like T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land,
a maze of meanings
hidden inside itself.
Sometimes you seem
like the old peepal tree
standing outside a village,
watching generations
arrive and disappear.
Sometimes
you are the grass
that quietly grows
on a narrow footpath
after the rain.
All I know is this:
one day
you will leave me,
slip out from within me
the way a bird flies away from a tree,
leaving behind
only silence.
One day will come
when this body
will fall quiet.
These hands
that once touched
bread, books, and pens
will turn into dust.
I do not know
whether my name will remain,
or my books,
or this madness for poetry,
this hunger to survive,
this endless love for humanity.
Where does life go, after all?
Does it vanish into the sea
like a river?
Does it dissolve into the sky
like smoke?
Or does it disappear into the soil
like a seed,
only to return
as a new plant?
All that I am--
a little water,
a little fire,
a little language,
a little poetry,
a few books,
a little love--
where will it remain
after you are gone?
Will my laughter survive
inside the laughter of a child?
Will my love remain
inside another woman’s heart?
Or will everything
simply become ashes?
Life,
you stayed with me
the way innocence lives in a child,
the way love lives
inside a young woman,
the way warmth lives in a stove,
the way kindness lives in a mother,
the way the smell of earth lives in bread,
the way poetry holds
countless meanings.
It will not be easy
to part from you.
There will be
a quiet sadness,
like tired workers
returning home
without their wages.
But whenever you leave,
leave gently--
like a leaf falling from a branch,
without noise,
without fear.
And wherever you take me,
keep at least this safe:
my mornings.
Because I have always believed
more in a new dawn
than in the night.