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

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...
17 comments
Read more

Ram, Anandhi, and Co

Book Review Title: Ram C/o Anandhi Author: Akhil P Dharmajan Translator: Haritha C K Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2025 Pages: 303 T he author tells us in his prefatory note that “this (is) a cinematic novel.” Don’t read it as literary work but imagine it as a movie. That is exactly how this novel feels like: an action-packed thriller. The story revolves around Ram, a young man who lands in Chennai for joining a diploma course in film making, and Anandhi, receptionist of Ram’s college. Then there are their friends: Vetri and his half-sister Reshma, and Malli who is a transgender. An old woman, who is called Paatti (grandmother) by everyone and is the owner of the house where three of the characters live, has an enviably thrilling role in the plot.   In one of the first chapters, Ram and Anandhi lock horns over a trifle. That leads to some farcical action which agitates Paatti’s bees which in turn fly around stinging everyone. Malli, the aruvani (transgender), s...
8 comments
Read more

The Blind Lady’s Descendants

Book Review Title: The Blind Lady’s Descendants Author: Anees Salim Publisher: Penguin India 2015 Pages: 301 Price: Rs 399 A metaphorical blindness is part of most people’s lives.  We fail to see many things and hence live partial lives.  We make our lives as well as those of others miserable with our blindness.  Anees Salim’s novel which won the Raymond & Crossword award for fiction in 2014 explores the role played by blindness in the lives of a few individuals most of whom belong to the family of Hamsa and Asma.  The couple are not on talking terms for “eighteen years,” according to the mother.  When Amar, the youngest son and narrator of the novel, points out that he is only sixteen, Asma reduces it to fifteen and then to ten years when Amar refers to the child that was born a few years after him though it did not survive.  Dark humour spills out of every page of the book.  For example: How reckless Akmal was! ...
5 comments
Read more

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...
122 comments
Read more