For a Now and a Then

A Poem by Abhra

Somehow it has been long since
I have not found you in my dreams
coiled in as-you-wish-mornings.
You come still.
Sometimes in the different shades of light,
sometimes as a stranger, or a picket fence,
or the kohl lined borders of vision.
But you come still. As you only know how,
with the tiptoe of unforeseen things.

I want to tell you about my eyes and the foothills of
my threadbare existence, in which days tread over deserts
few and far between, as they are.
I want to tell you about my voyages through
the rugged country of hope
and its alien neighborhoods, in which
more often than not, I no longer find your footsteps.
I only see some abandoned promises keeling
over lost poems.
In the handful of memories I keep,
there’s an image of your faint fingers kiting on my temples
meandering your name like solitary clouds in the
in the small sky of my eyes,

I wish, then, you came once.
Around my tiny feeble moon,
to the night around the giant oak trees,
sometimes in the fables
recounted by my shadows.
Someday, perhaps you will come,
somewhere around the gravest hour of my sleep.
partially leaning on my dreams and the silver sickle moon
with your elbows over them.
And you will smile from one dawn to another.
As you only know how.

I would want you to know
that I often wake up
to footmark the distance between a now and a then
between my palpitating nights and the throbbing seas
to hear your faint whispers, rippling through them
as you keep the count of twilights in me.
But for now and perhaps for a life,
I fear, with the breath of all the wild things
where we both wished we’d found love,
that tonight will be just another night,
in which you will arrive