Skip to main content

Narcissus

I sit in the centre of a black hole, thwarting
Light rays and science laws, charting
Joys and sorrows of the universe, mixing
Memory and desire and love, longing
To draw the universe to my core.

I am the nucleus of a singularity;
And my love surpasses infinity
Flowing from the plenitude of my being
And bounded, alas, by a black horizon.
Nothing can ever go beyond the horizon.

Love is a great conqueror.

Echo was the best of all
   that I ever drew to my core.
She was
   the distil of the finest mist
   the ardour of the deepest hope
   the sigh in the sweetest dream
   the pearl in the saddest tear

Echo was the best of all
   that I ever pinned with my love.

Hurled into the whirlpool
   that swirled inward
      from the brink to the core
         by the charm of my warmth
Echo was the best of all
   that ever pined for the best. 

I am the best.

I am the core of the fire
  that burns in the human heart
I am the heart of the calm
   that lies in the deepest ocean
I am the spirit that throbs
   in every waft of the air
I am the life that aches
   in every seed in the soil
I am the force that snaps
   the chains that bind the soul
I am alpha and omega
   the beginning and the end

I am Narcissus
Whose love is a whirlwind
That sweeps over the horizon
Drawing everything into my heart.
I love them all because they are all mine.
Mine.
Mine was she.

Echo was the best that I ever made mine.

Echo is now a sound
   that haunts the horizon
      unable to snap the cords
         stretched tight across her breast
            by my love.

Love is a great transmuter.

I long to draw the universe to my core
And hold it in a tight hug
And mumble gently,
“I love you!  I love you!”


Notes: 
1.      The similarity of the first stanza to the opening lines of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is not coincidental.
2.      The original Narcissus of Greek mythology spurned the love of Echo, because he was too much in love with himself. The Narcissus of this poem loves Echo, but he loves the whole universe, longs to hold the universe in his embrace.
3.  The poem was written more than twenty years ago, about a year after my marriage. 
4.  I'm posting it again after so many years simply because the poem has been rising in my consciousness again and again these days with a meaning quite different from what I had in mind when I originally wrote it. 

Comments

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

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...
16 comments
Read more

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...
19 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Book Review In one of the first pages of this book, the author cautions us to “read this book as you would a novel.” No one can remember the events of their lives accurately. Roy says that “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination … and we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.” What you remember may not be what happened exactly. As we get on with the painful process called life, we keep rewriting our own narratives. The book does read like a novel. Not because Roy has fictionalised her and her mother’s lives. The characters of these two women are extremely complex, that’s why. Then there is Roy’s style which transmutes everything including anger and despair into lyrical poetry. There’s a lot of pain and sadness in this book. The way Roy narrates all that makes it quite a classic in the genre of memoirs. The book is not so much about Roy’s mother Mary as about that mother’s impact on the daughter’s very being. Arundhati was born in the undivided ...
14 comments
Read more