The Slippery Slopes

A Poem by Swagato Saha

Lifeless you heed their sprawling limbs and the wayward leers that be,
Servile as thy leaves that wryly pale held to the wind’s mercy,
And silent as autumn sun melts cross thee ageing wilderness,
Lenses swarm your moves monitored, so you smile in harness…

They travel afar whence days run short and the nights shorter still,
Where rivers freeze and the fields tire impaled by granite hills,
O’ dreary dust-devils we’d steered past ushered by birdless skies,
Sincere in escape as in voyage, like in romance so of despise.

Ever so faint it makes you irk, riddled in this rustle of trees,
Or tremors that beat from peaks atop, shy as a mountain breeze,
So subtle these signs sink obscure, to the eyes thy shades caress,
But beauty’s strange to the urgent mind such never’d lust express!

Oh I’m no stranger to their captive ways; stoic I ’wait release,
To yards of speechless space secured for sorry idiosyncrasies,
Do you deem me due that yet you ache, are my words but spelt in vain?
Then let them die graceless as they came - so I shall refrain.

To be hauled but by runaway gusts to woods whence whispers brew,
And a blush of blooms like none foreseen shames the avenue!
As insects rise in hungry hordes to the chorus of scents I breathe,
In silent fall whilst nameless forms sleep in shadows evergreen…

Like wanderers of old on brinks I play the serenades you muse,
Tension trails our movements still but I’ve all the time to lose,
In seamless slips so secrets spill for as long as we choose to be,
Alone in the other’s wake… somewhere with no memory.