When I Look Back Poem by Praveen Kumar In Shobha Priya

When I look back,
Scenes of myriad comedies and tragedies
In innumerable hues and shades
Crowd the lanes of memories;
The shades in different garbs
Knock the doors of emotions Scene after scene;
How they all hauled me here
Along the unpredictable zigzag track,
I wonder in shock;
Ups and downs,
Jerks and shakes and tremors of shifts,
What plans and rules and terms of life,
How led me here,
For what transcendent end,
I can never figure out;
The laughs and grief,
Hid deep in the past's safe selves,
What dear salvation's ends serve,
Only the creator himself perhaps knows;
Each portrait from the womb of the past,
Be it pain or pleasure, or fall or rise,
Surfaces with dazzling aureate frame;
I delve on each, run over and over,
To bury the present in the shadows of the past
And dig a peep to the days ahead.


My past is a pasture trod by love, loss and fall,
Where beasts strayed to feast on gentle souls.


Men and women of most blessed kind
Light my past like the jewels of a crown;
The lilting lyrics and the immortal rhythms,
Those souls delivered to my life,
Carry me onward where only angels tread
And make the past, a valued treasure;
Like crystal dews on green leaves at dawn,
They refresh soul from the past's myriad streams.


There are fearsome ravines,
Deeper than a thousand hells;
There are dizzy heights too,
Where there were fears of steep fall;
Velvet spreads of tablelands too,
Where I plodded like a ghost in sleep,
And specters of stillness haunted soul;
Each surfaces from the bygone days
Through the long unending memory's lanes;
There were wild chases that led to naught,
There were weak limps to reach impossible heights,
Lucks, windfalls and joyous turnarounds too;
The moonlit dreams of love and joy,
The steely cold realities of the world around,
That brought down my feet on the firm ground;
They carry me onwards in detachment now
On the wings of the cool breeze of reflections.


Tempests were there,
All now holed up in the depths of the past
And I stand alone like cynosure and absorb it all;
I learn in slow process to live with it all;
The barrier does breach at times
And the past rushes in floods to the present
And inconsolable goes my heart
For the past that was lost forever
With its love and joy and pristine beauty;
A subtle and lovely world that was the past
That shows me in my true colours,
Untouched by the dazzle of the false self.

The past is never lost, it whispers in the present;
The past is the guide that leads me ahead
To the cosmic unity of the time, space and deed.