Skip to main content

When all is revealed


When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.
[Louis MacNiece, ‘The Sunlight on the Garden’]

You cannot hide everything
behind the façade of lies,
however beautiful the façade is.

What will pain you the most
and appal those who had stood in awe
will be the horror of the grin
that the mask had concealed hitherto.

Trade in dreams cannot go on forever,
false promises will breed barren fever,
the phantoms crafted in the past
won’t be quelled with rituals of exorcism,
confessions and angst will accompany.

When all is revealed
you won’t have the right
to seek pardon.





Comments

  1. Awesome When all is revealed you won’t have the right to seek pardon.....beautiful lines !

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm becoming more and more convinced that poetry can only come from the heart.

      Delete
  2. "You cannot hide..however beautiful the façade is.."
    So true..loved it ! :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. "You cannot hide everything
    behind the façade of lies,
    however beautiful the façade is"... Appreciate this reflection the most !

    ReplyDelete
  4. Absolutely ....nicely put every syllable

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks. I'm consoled that my feelings are apparently universal.

      Delete
  5. Wow lovely lines,deep and meaningful . You can't hide behind lies forever,the truth shall reveal at some point of time. Didn't know you composed poetry too sir. Very nice.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I don't write poetry unless something happens to me personally which creates powerful ripples within me.

      Thanks for the appreciation, Nima.

      Delete
  6. I am wondering who is this 'khalnayayak' with a grin concealed behind the mask :)
    "trade in dreams cannot go on forever" ...these lines have lot of hurt and anguish....can feel it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. When the time comes I'll reveal it, Bushra. For now, I can only say that both in this poem and the last one (Puppet Show at Workplace) the 'you' refers to the same person.

      Delete
  7. Truth of life..revealed so profoundly in the lines... :-)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Experienced truths tend to be profound, Maniparna.

      Delete
  8. Replies
    1. Thanks for the suggestion, Rajeev. But poetry comes to me only once in a while.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Vegetarian

Book Review Title: The Vegetarian Author: Han Kang Translator: Deborah Smith [from Korean] Publisher: Granta, London, 2018 Pages: 183 Insanity can provide infinite opportunities to a novelist. The protagonist of Nobel laureate Han Kang’s Booker-winner novel, The Vegetarian , thinks of herself as a tree. One can argue with ample logic and conviction that trees are far better than humans. “Trees are like brothers and sisters,” Yeong-hye, the protagonist, says. She identifies herself with the trees and turns vegetarian one day. Worse, she gives up all food eventually. Of course, she ends up in a mental hospital. The Vegetarian tells Yeong-hye’s tragic story on the surface. Below that surface, it raises too many questions that leave us pondering deeply. What does it mean to be human? Must humanity always entail violence? Is madness a form of truth, a more profound truth than sanity’s wisdom? In the disturbing world of this novel, trees represent peace, stillness, and nonviol...

The RSS does not exist

An organisation that has 80,000 branches in India does not exist legally in any document. This is the cover story of The Caravan this month. By the way, The Caravan is one of the very few publications that still continues to exist in spite of being overtly critical of Narendra Modi and his Sangh Parivar. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is not registered as an organisation under any of the usual Indian registration laws such as the Societies Registration Act or as a trust or company. It functions as an unregistered voluntary organisation, though it is arguably the largest public organisation in the country. This situation makes the organisation absolutely unaccountable to anyone, argues The Caravan . The RSS is not legally required to file annual returns to the Tax department or disclose its financial details publicly though it deals with thousands of crores of rupees every year especially after Modi became the Prime Minister of the country. The membership of the organisat...

No Problems Only Opportunities

You’ve probably heard this joke. A young man walked into his office one morning and found a beautiful young lady sitting in his chair. He called the MD and said, “Sir, I have a problem.” The MD replied, “Don’t you know our company’s motto, young man? No Problems, Only Opportunities .” When Suchita of The Blogchatter sent me a mail with the topic of this week’s blog hop –  - the first thing that came to my mind was the above joke. I know many people – too many, in fact – who went through terrible problems. My own life was a series of problems in none of which was there the consolation of any beautiful woman. One essential lesson I learnt from life is that life is a series of problems. You solve one and then arises the next one. Now I have reached an age when problems are no more problems: they are life itself. If you ask me what was the biggest problem I ever dealt with, it was my last years in Shillong. I was a lecturer in a college drawing a fat salary stipulated by the U...