In The Evening Of My Life Poem by JIBAN GOSWAMI

IN THE EVENING OF MY LIFE
In the evening of life as I loll on my rocking chair
My eyes look but do not see all that’s around me.
I ride piggy- back on memories’ fragments
to times gone past and lost forever.
Lullabies wafting in the evening air
evoke mother’s scent:
the scent I have sought in every woman...
Love possibly smells always like that.
Confused of what I was after,
as I keep waiting for the tomb,
I realise I spent my life in an endless quest
For the warmth of a mother’s womb.

Strains of forgotten songs,
wafting out of mind’s debris
evoke elation without reason.
Memories that trigger it
shimmer hazily in the mists of time
buried in the detritus of past
strewn along my life’s trail

Memory’s doors
are clogged by amnestic rust.
Miasma of bygone bliss
seep through them
and my mind gets drenched by
swirling mists of past

In the twilight of consciousness
I clamber up the moonbeams
Through a floating debris of dreams
left behind by departing beings.
My mind traces the wrinkles
on faces from my past
We were like islands rising from
a common floor in an ocean of love,
our minds in harmonic resonance
we could hear each other think
telepathy seemed merely cognitive
our emotions transcended this.

Wilting flowers, fading beauty, youth past its prime
like dreams passing relentlessly through the sieve of time,
leaving residues of fragrant memories sticking to mind.
Blazes of passion are now dying embers
I can still smell their heady fumes
like tendrils rising from ashes of youth
when I traded my sanity and prudence
for fleeting peeks into an illusory paradise’s portals
Tiptoeing by the haunted past
I often tripped on jutting jagged memories
my bleeding guilt formed spiky crystals
serrating peace to smithereens.

In the evening of life as I loll on my rocking chair,
Tired rays of the setting sun drape the ruins of the day
From the marauding fingers of night till dawn wakes again
I wait for a newborn Sun to trample
over the dusts of a life’s ruins,
ending a hiatus in continuum of time.


As curtains are about to fall
on an act in an endless circus
how I wish as I depart
to leave behind me
a soul better than the one I got at birth.


And then....
Let me lose my being in a beam of light,
to weave through the stars forever
Mozart’s fingers, by a piano ‘andante’,
caressing me to deathless slumber