Chimera Poem by Debtoru Chatterjee

Some go out to court bloody Death
In battle, on the point of steel
Others live out their varied life spans
Like the end of a length of reel

Some see their deaths approach
At the edge of a cliff or foot of hill
Those passing in sleep-there's no such reproach!
Death comes as an opiate, silent, still

Some see Death in carnivora
Others in treacherous rocks
Yet some in the print of sentence
For felonies heard on the docks.

The rope that saves a drowning man
Coils also around the condemned's spine
It saves a climber of the steep
But answers the hangman's sign.

O let us decide how we should see Death
In some courtly formal meet
Not singed by the fires of some hell
But in some cool, balmy retreat

And not like some violent autumnal gale
But the red sun sinking slow
No sudden flashing lightning's whip
For kin to take the blow

For flowers fade in gentle steps
And the tide comes in but slow
And butterflies don't fly from eggs
No tree's axed in one go

When birth is so gentle and quiet
And seasons turn so slow
Oh Death! Why must you but not
Take heed of Nature's flow?