Have You Ever Wondered...? Poem by Mangesh Sonawane

Are you still there?
Or are you lost somewhere?
Leaving your body here,
But your mind elsewhere?

Are you lost in the galaxies?
Or in the sprawling cities?
Or simply wondering life
And its absurdities?

Are you listening to what I say,
Or do you dream of the Milky Way?
Are you even alive with me,
Or your thoughts far away?

What do you ponder so deeply immersed?
Are they the mysteries of the Universe?
Do you even know that I'm here,
Or have you dived into thought headfirst?

Do you ever wonder the origin of life?
How creatures creature evolve on the edge of a knife?
How humanity springs back
Again and again from times of strife?

Do you ever ponder, lost,
The answer to why we are here?
Do you ever ask yourself
Why we age every year?

Do you find yourself pondering why
You are pondering the reason why
You ponder what you ponder,
Where you ponder, how you ponder and why?

Do you ever doubt yourself, of what you can do?
And what is beyond the miracle that is you?
Do you ever question reason itself,
And the reasoning behind why reason is true?

Do you ever worry that god never did exist?
Or if he does, what is on His divine list?
Or if he doesn't, why the world is as it is,
Lost, forever shrouded in mysterious mists?

Do you ponder how Beethoven wrote
His beautiful works, note by note?
Do you ever muse and compare
A Frenchman to a wooly goat?

Do you wonder what really lies
Just beneath the canopy of the skies?
Do you wonder how a bird feels
When above the clouds, it flies?

Have you ever wondered what lies after death?
What drives our lives, our every breath
Have you ever asked yourself every now and then,
What it means to be greatest?

Did you ever wonder what it means
To be truly human, beneath material screens?
Do kindness and love, care and adoration
Come inherited through genes?

Or are they learned behavioral traits?
Would that explain the more cruel aspects
Of human psyche, like evil?
Or are they just a play of the fates?

Ever asked the goodness in you, that will
The same things that drive you to love, drive you to kill
Ever asked the human within you,
Why is the morality in us so ill?

Ever wondered why questions occur so many?
Why some make sense, but most are silly?
Ever wondered the mysteries of the mind,
Why some people seem warm, and some chilly?

Do you ever find yourself so lost in thought,
That you don't see what is before you, and what is not?
Do you ever ponder the meaning of words
That lose their meaning when sought?

I wonder all these and more,
Yet they remain unanswered and sore...
The one answer I so desperately seek is
What lies at the core of my core?

What teaches me about joy, pain, love and hate?
Do I really do what I do, or has it been determined before date?
What, then, is the purpose of my existence,
If I resign myself to fate...?

If I resign myself to fate...
If I resign myself to fate...