Private World Poem by Ajit Das

It’s the closing time: a late ray
of the weakening sun creeping
though the broken blinds
draws out down the window sill.

Streets swarm with commuters
jostling, elbowing, home-bound,
yet the evening holds out promises
of few moments face-to-face in a café
or in the corner of a roadside park,
strewn with sun-burnt leftover.

Rush-hour traffic crawling, fuming,
blurting out exhaust of the daily grind,
buses with dangling human limbs,
skyscrapers and their hard outlines
silhouetted against a grey sky,
paint a backdrop that brings out
the incongruity of the private world.
Trapped in impersonal metropolis,
it fights an unequal battle to retain
its own identity, its meaning.

Like the heaving trees in a mute night,
silence communicates in syllables,
more tangible, wasted hopes,
lost dreams, while we sit together,
trying to hedge our private world.