WAKE

by  A.V. Koshy

What you might feel for Krishna
or I for Ma(g)dale(i)ne,
is it not the same sun lighting up the universe
Shakuntala
whether seen from death's or life's eyes?

Once, when I called you Shakuntala
were my eyes not the windows of the life-giving sun
to you and were you not my flowering lotus
drinking my love up greedily, delirious:
happy as never before in its rays that stun?

But now if it's only a cold star dying
I am no longer the one
and you are only a pond with no white or pink
lotus in it
just eclipsed by some green scum
loving buffalos
wallowing in the mud and pretending
the buffalo is not Yama's black One

Then if it be so that it is Death you love
more than life, like a cup of black water -
not this golden expanse of my solar flare -
be reaped by his scythe till you relearn that one loved you
more than life and death,
one of whom
it will be said one day
he was Life
but wrapped in death's disguise
so as to awaken in you again, then - ah! too painfully late -
the Lotus and its play with the Sun
and its longing to be called again by that once lovely name
(Shakuntala)
without the shadow of this darkness falling on it,
escaped from what looks beautiful but is only a poisonous dark cloud
of no rain, now about to choke you to death!

Shakuntala, can't you hear the difference in the tone of my voice when I call your name?
Return before it is too late; come back here, my dagger, and bury yourself deep into my heart's arms.
to realize, at least then, I dead, that your home was not there with him but it is only at Home with me that you will ever belong.