I Go Back To Thepast Poem by Mohabeer Beeharry

After several years,
I went back home, where once a long time ago
I decided to bury my tears and heartbreaks.
Many a sordid thing I wanted to forget.

I wanted to see my old village,
The woodlands, the rivers, the well and the old girls
All dear and cherished....... of my childhood days.

Very little had survived the onslaught of time,
The trudge of the modern giants.
A searing torrent of remorse seized my heart,
And helplessly, tears flushed my eyes, I cried.

What was once my home is now an august edification
Imposing and meticulously decorated.

I tried hard to reconcile myself to this new phenomena
And wondered whether it was not me instead
Caught into that sweet inebriating slumber of a childhood past.
That was still living in a past that had long ceased to be.

Still all was not dead
And vanished!
Not everything!

I could still catch
the clear sky studded with endless tinsels of star lights,
the tantalizing fragrance of the queen- of- the- night,
As one after another
Memories of that remote and magical past gently rose
From the slumber inside me.

Love, they say
True love never dies.
Time passes, it hides itself between cracks of life
Taking new forms and names
biding its time to bloom again.
I waited for it all to bloom.
I waited for the touch of my old childhood days

They were still there.
Those unwritten phantoms of gliding mist
Those stray moon light,
Those flights of birds and those mellow giggles and chatters
of the old girls, as clear and as pure as the blue sky.

For that past was not out there lost in the fog of time
Not at the mercy of the modern ruthlessness,
It was in me,
With me, it has never left me,
In every breath,
Every throb of my heart.

At night when my sleep is deep,
I could hear their plaints and whispers
Tellingme to wake up.

Dreams of my childhood loiterings
The rivers, the slopes full of flowers,
those massive boulders of rocks
That ancient cemetery decked with clear aureate sunshine
And flowering hibiscus, those aimless strolls
And the flaming flamboyant, they were all there,
In myself.

This is when the past and the present merge.
Who cares what phantasmagoria the past is
Or the present
Or even the future
They never existed for me.

All I know is that I live
I lived
And I will live.
The secret of life is to be
And never to stop being.
For death is only a bus stop
Where you get off and wait for a change.