Poem Hunter: Poems - Poets - Poetry

It is startling to see how swiftly
A man may be sliced
From chin to prick,
How easily the bones
He has felt whole
Under his chest
For a sixty, seventy years
May be snapped,
With what calm
Liver, lung and heart
Be examined, the bowels
Noted for defect, the brain
For haemorrhage,
And all these insides
That have for a lifetime
Raged and strained to understand
Be dumped back into the body,
Now stitched to perfection,
Before announcing death
As due to an obscure reason.

[From: Poems; Publisher: Nissim Ezekiel, Mumbai, 1966]
...

I keep on dying again.
Veins collapse, opening like the
Small fists of sleeping
Children.
Memory of old tombs,
Rotting flesh and worms do
Not convince me against
The challenge. The years
And cold defeat live deep in
Lines along my face.

...

I am alive, I love my life!
There is a God, unparalleled.
I know how find
'Cos I have right mind.

Let's remember what God gave you
Don't forget that he always see you
Now, look around! and just say that
I belong you and I just love you!
...

If souls should only sheen so bright
In heaven as in e'thly light,
An' nothen better wer the cease,
How comely still, in sheape an' feace,
Would many reach thik happy pleace, -
The hopevul souls that in their prime
Ha' seem'd a-took avore their time, -
The young that died in beauty.

But when woone's lim's ha' lost their strangth
A-tweilen drough a lifetime's langth,
An' over cheaks a-growen wold
The slowly-weasten years ha' roll'd
The deep'nen wrinkle's hollow vwold;
When life is ripe, then death do call
Vor less ov thought, than when do vall
On young vo'ks in their beauty.

But pinen souls, wi' heads a-hung
In heavy sorrow vor the young,
The sister ov the brother dead,
The father wi' a child a-vled,
The husband when his bride ha' laid
Her head at rest, noo mwore to turn,
Have all a-vound the time to murn
Vor youth that died in beauty.

An' yeet the church, where prayer do rise
Vrom thoughtvul souls, wi' downcast eyes,
An' village greens, a-beat half beare

...

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops

...

When a person moves through time,
They're reborn in form, but not in mind—
A new face, a brand-new start,
But the same old soul, the same old heart.

The body may change, the name may fade,
But essence and spirit remain the same.
Without the heart, the eyes can lie,
Drawn to beauty that quickly dies.


...

I examine
my skin

searching for
the pore

with EXIT
over it
...

'Come, try your skill, kind gentlemen,
A penny for three tries!'
Some threw and lost, some threw and won
A ten-a-penny prize.

She was a tawny gypsy girl,
A girl of twenty years,
I liked her for the lumps of gold
That jingled from her ears;


...

You're the queen, and I'm the clown
You call me friend with lips all crave around
I twist and turn inside with doubt
I see my mirror, want to shout
Your rosy blush still shines at sea
I try the same, they laugh at me
It isn't envy that I feel, just fear
I swear I don't cry out of shame, my dear
It's just that I saw you appear.
...