Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 3, Number 1. May 2020. ISSN: 2581-7094
Waiting
Life locked in vaults across the world
embryos frozen for decades, maybe more
waiting to be born.
Who knows how long it will be?
or how it feels to gather all eternity
on the stoical shelf of serendipity?
Created in the crucible
of the laboratory cold
they do not grow old
But continue in their chronology strange
not growing into being
but trembling on the brink of becoming.
Suffocating in the clinical smell
of science that consigns them to hell
or should one say a limbo
neither here nor there
not born, nor worn but torn
between possibilities
Of adoption by host parents
across cultures and colours,
and mutating meridians
For implantation, tricky gestation,
birth and mother's lap,
chance of a life, chance of a lifetime
Or perhaps signed away for use in research
maybe simply destroyed, or preserved
in time's formidable formaldehyde
For aeons of endless waiting
in the wings, did they ever ask
to be engineered, in the first place?
No
Promise of a Thaw
On their way to the next camp
They were but dots in the distance
Connecting the crevices,
Bridging the vastness,
And bringing the emptiness
Into swaying
focus
Hazy and trembling, at first
Then gradually cohering
Into a locus.
Shivering in the stiff shells
Of their uniforms, raw and numb,
They were
cogs in the war machine
Trudging across the wastes,
To become in time's rushing embrace
The flying splinters
Of scattering shrapnel
Amidst the mayhem
Of shrill, detonating decibel.
The wind whistling
Across the forlorn heights
Tore into their young hearts
Dispersing what little heat
They had carefully preserved
In the feeble bonfires within, fed
By dry, crackling twigs
Of hopes scavenged
From the dying hearth of life.
Their boots left hollows in the snow
Freshly fallen, muddy smudges
In a palette, white and wet.
An inconsequential trail
Etched by destiny's drudges
That was quickly covered
By the silently falling snow,
In a continual blow,
No promise of a thaw.
Illusion
At first it seems
There never will be an end
To the showers of hours
And golden coins of days
In their scattering, clattering splendour,
Promise of time's eternal dower
To the innocent young
On the ladder's first rung.
All those steps ahead for whom
At their age
must surely be
A veritable eternity
With its precious hoard
Of unspent days
Invested in the treasury
Of a future
That is always the future,
Deliciously distant, yet to come.
For who really cares
Or frets and fears
At that time
About a time
Which does not for them exist
Except perhaps in theory
Or in a far off futurity,
Beyond immediate reckoning?
The reckless, feckless, dauntless young,
Rich in the usury
Of their stock in years
Live not desperately or resignedly
Like the old: in the "once upon a time"
Of fabular beginnings,
But in the ends of fairy tales:
The horizon of the "happily ever after."
Trusting implicitly
In youth's sweet longevity
And its power to retain
Undiminished vitality,
And a present
That is not prescient
With the complicity
Of the past.