I Am A Confused Man Poem by JIBAN GOSWAMI

I am a confused man

I am a confused man.
I don’t seem to need a God.
But in moments of stress,
my hands fold into prayers:
as if in reflex, conditioned.
Am I a hypocrite or a confused cowardly agnostic,
reason pulling me in one way, atavistic emotions the other?

I can’t logically reconcile to rebirth.
But I do know,
the matter in me as I die
would be consumed by fire
or by the soil where I’d be interred
or by the vultures atop towers of silence
and may turn into fodder for the worms
and the birds and trees.
Atoms that once bore traces of me
may get passed on to their progeny,
and if that’s what rebirth is,
Yes, I can believe in that, fully.

But the matter in me got infused with consciousness
At some unknown point in the process of birth
As a sperm triggered creation’s primeval dance
Within an waiting ovum amid paeans of divine mirth

Did consciousness immutably emerge
As Ying and Yang,
each carrying consciousness In incomplete halves
Danced in pulsating rhythms of creation,
in moves choreographed in supra-genomics codes?
And infused my being with consciousness
at the precise moment of conception
and my soul was born?


No cyclotron has traced ingredients of consciousness
Nor has any stem cell cloned it.
Out of a medley of assorted atoms
How did consciousness emerge, where is it hid?

Is it matter, is it energy?
Or something for which humans do not have words?
it surely is something that transcend our senses
Lying beyond our perception’s wall,
A quantum of reality with myriad dimensions?
That has length, breadth, depth, time,
X, Y, Z, alpha, omega et al?