Sanctuary Lost

There is a door,
white framed and glass paned.
I've looked through it a hundred thousand times.
          
But today,
today was different.
            Shimmering azure waters,
            pink lolling toungs of pups;
            my childhood play things
                                           were not
                                                    what caught my eye.

I slither through the crack,
                                 narrow space
                                             I permit myself,
so as not to wake mother from her mid-day slumber.

Creep across the steaming cement and sharp white rocks.
Summer grass tickling my bare feet---- I reach for it.
Shiny thing which caught my eye, a latch?
The fence shudders under my unsteady child's hand
                                                                           and swings open.
Magic!
Sparkling waters of a creek that slithers,
                                                    through the depths of the suburbs.
It beckons me to follow it---- so I do.

A dusty trail leads me to a secret paradise,
              my sanctuary for years to come.
I've lain in the field of poppies for hours
       ----and days.
Where miners lettuce fed my hunger pangs,
Where the touch of lamb's-ear calmed my nerves,
Where I made endless flower chains.

I never wanted to leave.
                                But, one day
           mother's husband came,
                                         stealing it,
                                                  and her,

                                                         away from me.
                                     

“No, I wasn’t meant to love and be loved”

By: Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib

Translated By: Vijay Seshadri

No, I wasn’t meant to love and be loved.

If I’d lived longer, I would have waited longer.

Knowing you are faithless keeps me alive and hungry.

Knowing you faithful would kill me with joy.

Delicate are you, and your vows are delicate, too,

so easily do they break.

You are a laconic marksman. You leave me

not dead but perpetually dying.

I want my friends to heal me, succor me.

Instead, I get analysis.

Conflagrations that would make stones drip blood

are campfires compared to my anguish.

Two-headed, inescapable anguish!—

Love’s anguish or the anguish of time.

Another dark, severing, incommunicable night.

Death would be fine, if I only died once.

I would have liked a solitary death,

not this lavish funeral, this grave anyone can visit.

You are mystical, Ghalib, and, also, you speak beautifully.

Are you a saint, or just drunk as usual?

Source: Poetry (April 2009).

           This poem speaks to me on a couple different levels. I love the authors progression in
introducing the relationship. It feels like such a real reflection. In the beginning there is bitterness in the tone when the author says,"No, I wasn’t meant to love and be loved./ If I’d lived longer, I would have waited longer." A lamentation of their state of being perpetually waiting on someone who would never be theirs. Moving on the author spends three stanzas describing the degree of anguish this makes them feel. Then the subject turns to the narrators friends for the next two standaz describing the separation the narrator felt even from friends  because of the relationship. It describes how they offered no comfort but rather criticizm using exquisite imagery to express the degree of harm their treatment made the narrator feel, for example: "Conflagrations that would make stones drip blood/ are campfires compared to my anguish." The narrator descibes how this feeling carries on over a period of time. The end though, is what grounds poem in reality,the part i connected with most, "You are mystical, Ghalib, and, also, you speak beautifully./ Are you a saint, or just drunk as usual?" This poem is about those silver tounged devils who may be genuine when they're sober but when they're drunk, they do what they have to to get what they want.