Fragrance Of Memories Poem by Aniruddha Pathak

Capturing cakes' cologne, smell of sea-shores,
But who'd, I wonder, such weird things want?
How fair, mind stores memories and restores,
And fairer still, it wipes cobwebs that haunt.
Man may be charmed by a caressing smell,
A rare gem, jewel, may well a man move,
But bagfuls in shops may not steal a spell,
It's body that wore— of a lady love.
Imagine the scents of life that remain—
Out-of-world one of a first-born in arm,
That spontaneous hug ever so warm,
And that fragrance of earth fetched by first rain.
Science may capture smells, release at will,
But, mind does it fairly well sans a bill!
______________________________________________________
Research is inventing cameras that can record smells, and can ‘see' old memories in photograph. A funnel sucks in the smell's particles, and deposits them in a polymer preparing a graph so that the same fragrance, say, of a birthday cake, can be released and re-experienced. This piece however throws in a poetic caveat. Some agonies of life are best forgotten and buried. Some still have their charm in recalling, ever so vague, like reaching into the cupboard of life, rummaging for a fragment there, a remnant here in ‘remembrance of things past'— the kind of memories, when taken a whole, some hurting, some comforting, which no camera can truly capture, save the mind's. And if it does at will, there is always a bill.
______________________________________________________
Sonnets | 06.07.13 |