White Night

"And was it his destined part
Only one moment in his life
To be close to your heart?
Or was he fated from the start
to live for just one fleeting instant,"

And how could she foresee
the intent in your heart?
How could she divine the secret passion that you hid in your heart,
the passion without a name and without a face too?How would she know who held
her when she sidled close, to  him or to you?

And why did you create the distance to separate your identity in two?
And when she chose one of the two
why did you take away from her the one she chose
to step in and remove from her the one face she believed she loved?

You scripted the story of a fated lover
destined to be close to her
only for a moment
and then to be torn apart?

All this while you kept a chair for her
in your private zone
for her to occupy as if it belonged to none but her.
And when she was halfway close, forgetting a little
the pain of her separated lover,
she, looking with a craving to the empty chair,
why did you keep quiet and watch her come and go?

And now to keep her wondering who
it was she loved and lost
you have already willed her half-way to come to you
and she knows not how and when she was drawn to you.

And strange rivals, one who loved and lived, who you hid in your heart!
and the one she believed she loved and lost,
were you the one whom she loved?
You were playing with embers which were about to die.
Did you so much as this rely
on the rules of playing a game so dangerously close
to the brink of a fatal loss?

A something 'missing' in the order of it all,
a longing for the simple and the true ,
the something which language would not rob
of certainty in the shifting scenario of
avalanche and arid sands,
both dreaded for their extreme
lack of presence,
the presence that must enter and survive in the gap....

Is she the one fated also to be like he,
the one fated from the start
to live for one fleeting moment in your heart?

And here by the old fireplace she sits,
in the dwindling of the edifice of frozen things
creating a distance between her images, symbols and her meanings,
a cavern for her to hide from you what she would not reveal,
a fear: a primordial fear of giving up
what never belonged to her,
the primordial fear of the pronouncement of judgement
on a woman who fails to understand
the storms ravaging all her being,
the men who come and go,
and the loneliness behind it all,
the shadow with whom she is finally left,
the futility of surviving in the dark,
questioning the need to articulate
the fears, the projections of the mind cast on the wall ,
hiding and simultaneously wanting you to know
that the she of the discourse and the "I" who hides are not different; they are the same,
the identical in the world of the real