The Betrayal Poem by Sofiul Azam

"... to be alone. Because it's not your enemies who condemn you to solitude, it's your friends." - from The Joke by Milan Kundera

Everyday people say it's my heart
that arches over life like a bridge
making way from happiness to misery.
All of my feelings that bloomed for friends
like flowers in an oasis are now cold
as prehistoric icebergs in the North pole.

Somewhere off in the vaster void
where even whispers of silence are heard,
the castle of my mind listened to
a siren foretelling a sudden air-raid.
As I come out of my room
environed by things in disrepair,

I never break through goings-on
like infraction for the shedding of clichés,
and won't get even once wild flowers
passed through barbed wires! You see
how a loudmouth's performance
like mine has shrunk into nil!

No, it's not that simple you think it to be.
I would like to have you know
that all of a sudden after being betrayed
by the things I took for granted,
by the fellows I always looked to for consolation,
by myself the prophet of my own doom,

yes, so far away from the city's
sprawling bustle of cars and the crowd,
I, too, sat on an ochre-red hilltop
just as many of the staunch romantics
all betrayed by life itself,
and I watched the deep blue water

frothy with countless waves
that came up lapping on the lonely shore
so marvelously so perfectly as always before,
gulls flocking around crabs and pebbles
and the sky arching down to kiss
the sea over there in the far distance.

I brood over misery and the betrayal.


from IN LOVE WITH A GORGON (2010)