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.





Labels:

Comments

  1. UnknownJuly 19, 2014 at 4:24 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 19, 2014 at 8:08 PM

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

      Delete
  2. Renu VyasJuly 19, 2014 at 4:30 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousJuly 19, 2014 at 6:05 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousJuly 19, 2014 at 8:15 PM

    Absolutely ....nicely put every syllable

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 19, 2014 at 8:23 PM

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

      Delete
  5. Nima DasJuly 20, 2014 at 6:53 PM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 20, 2014 at 7:19 PM

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

      Thanks for the appreciation, Nima.

      Delete
  6. Bushra MuzaffarJuly 21, 2014 at 7:40 AM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 21, 2014 at 9:22 AM

      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. ManiparnaJuly 21, 2014 at 11:45 AM

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

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 21, 2014 at 5:56 PM

      Experienced truths tend to be profound, Maniparna.

      Delete
  8. Rajeev MoothedathJuly 21, 2014 at 12:23 PM

    you should write poetry more often!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 21, 2014 at 5:57 PM

      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
47 comments
Read more

Waiting for the Mahatma

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi...
9 comments
Read more

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...
31 comments
Read more

The Lights of December

The crib of a nearby parish [a few years back] December was the happiest month of my childhood. Christmas was the ostensible reason, though I wasn’t any more religious than the boys of my neighbourhood. Christmas brought an air of festivity to our home which was otherwise as gloomy as an orthodox Catholic household could be in the late 1960s. We lived in a village whose nights were lit up only by kerosene lamps, until electricity arrived in 1972 or so. Darkness suffused the agrarian landscapes for most part of the nights. Frogs would croak in the sprawling paddy fields and crickets would chirp rather eerily in the bushes outside the bedroom which was shared by us four brothers. Owls whistled occasionally, and screeched more frequently, in the darkness that spread endlessly. December lit up the darkness, though infinitesimally, with a star or two outside homes. December was the light of my childhood. Christmas was the happiest festival of the period. As soon as school closed for the...
14 comments
Read more

Schrödinger’s Cat and Carl Sagan’s God

Image by Gemini AI “Suppose a patriotic Indian claims, with the intention of proving the superiority of India, that water boils at 71 degrees Celsius in India, and the listener is a scientist. What will happen?” Grandpa was having his occasional discussion with his Gen Z grandson who was waiting for his admission to IIT Madras, his dream destination. “Scientist, you say?” Gen Z asked. “Hmm.” “Then no quarrel, no fight. There’d be a decent discussion.” Grandpa smiled. If someone makes some similar religious claim, there could be riots. The irony is that religions are meant to bring love among humans but they end up creating rift and fight. Scientists, on the other hand, keep questioning and disproving each other, and they appreciate each other for that. “The scientist might say,” Gen Z continued, “that the claim could be absolutely right on the Kanchenjunga Peak.” Grandpa had expected that answer. He was familiar with this Gen Z’s brain which wasn’t degenerated by Instag...
11 comments
Read more