Myriad Reflections. Shastri Akella

Diamond

She arrived in a rush
her gown swirling & swelling
golden locks entangled & strewn all over her face
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‘can you please mind this word for me’, she requested
crimson lips shivering whilst spelling her etiquette-dabbed question
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‘Can’t you see my hands are full’, I ask, baffled
‘pantomimes swimming in my arms,
free verse crawling over my shoulders,
words spilling over,
a tender thought, a fragile dream holding together the complex design
in a varnished cauldron of inspiration’
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a flicker of pride in my voice,
Tut-tut vain writer
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‘but it is just one word I want you to mind’ she restates
‘I promise I shan’t be long,
I’m off for but a brief swim in the oceans of madness,
to taste the sweet ambrosia of genesis in
all its archaic glory’
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Intrigued, I offer my consent:
‘place it on the white sheet there,
the paper was meant for a requiem of lost muse,
but it shall now be the caretaker of your word’
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‘You are a generous soul’ she cooed,
as the word cascaded from her cupped calms,
a tumble of azure with sparkling-white dust motes,
imprinting itself brazenly on my crusty parchment,
in grand sweeps & callous curves
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the dawns faded, the moon depleted, the days slid past,
silent hours of the in-between
spent seeking the flutter of golden hair across my mahogany door,
but there is no sign of her return
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when she finally emerged at the brink of my property,
I bawled, ‘Lost in the dollops of time when you vanished:
poetic notes of musical meter,
precious tales of jewel shimmer,
all because your big fat word,
sat at the center of my page:
the only available cushioning,
for all my thoughts’
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‘patience’, she said,
the timber of her voice etched with discovered notes of self-assuredness
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her outstretched hand & an open palm,
offer me a diamond,
one that could have as well been a star from the galaxy,
glittering & aglow with a cosmic allure
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I pick my quill & dab it with the ink of muse,
to capture that vivid beauty in a free verse of sorts
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She objects with raised eyebrows, ‘Not for muse,
‘but for pain.
It takes a diamond to cut another,
it takes pain to open up the tunnels of poetry,
for after all, is not all poetry,
the quintessence of pain:
the final distilled remains,
of pain sanitized of human trauma & prejudice’
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she flung the diamond at my chest,
& it became awash in my blood
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I clutch my bleeding heart,
& find my poetry afloat,
unbridled & free from the fetters of a thinking mind,
appending bits of infinite to flood the milky way,
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it suddenly strikes me,
the absence of that word from my attention span,
the one that sat silently on my page all this while.
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She ran past,
& I saw the sweep of azure,
my lips moist with tears,
as I spell it out, that word.
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True: it takes a diamond to cut another,
& pain to decipher the crystallized sum of all pain:
the artifact I discover on my page,
& that imprints my poetry with a finishing signature of eternity.
‘Love’.
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