POETRY: You–The Only Solace

Through how many such ray less nights
While scratching corroded wounds
Have I been writing to You
In obscure, blurry ink
By the shade of an onerous yellow moon
That hangs by my window
Like an antique vapory lamp
While air crinkles into paper
And oceans cleave
Transpiring
One colossal roll of undeciphered whispers

Then, axe these epochs, O Companion of my wanderings
Those out wall me
On a relinquished beat
From Your numinous, secure retreat.
You, who is sprouting in me
Like a perennial May bloom
Like a soft tangle of colors
Whirling in a cesspool

I fear this tumultuous night again
Ravaging intense on a senile brain
Tearing the rhyme
In pain and slush
And again I mumble
My comatose grief
Into a haunted sphere.

Then hear me again,
O redeemer of this implacable pain!
For memory shatters me.
And time reeks stagnant. A rotting stain.

See the Moon has dissolved away
In that black, phantasmal wall
And I still write to You
Splitting in vagueness, piece by piece; all in all.

Cutting the misty sheets of life
Unlit subsistence stares in face

The world is shamelessly cruel
And You -the only solace.

[Syed Rabea Bukhari (2015) is a postgraduate student of Public Administration in the Department of Political Science. She can be reached via email at: seemasrrb[at]gmail.com]