The long winds sweeping across the old Badaun,
In gentle yellow October,
I can still feel singing in my ears,
Their cold breath kisses my face and
Rubs my frigid heart,
The winds
Still playful and laughing,
Run their long fingers in my hairs,
Lovingly—
Like a dead Mum calling
Her orphan child,
From across the divide of time and space.
The gray-white pigeons come circling
To finally settle on the gleaming spires and minarets,
Of tombs forgotten,
Still standing erect and tall
In the feeble sunlight,
The rays
Streaming down in rapid fall
Of golden dust
Scattering around,
That lends a magical touch
To the entire ancient city,
Where the past glorious
Intersect with mundane present,
A city,
Enshrined and etched
Permanently in my
Remembering, aching heart,
On lonely metropolitan nights
Spent caged, on the sixteenth- floor house,
Where you peer down but cannot see
Things crawling below—mere moving dots—
In the blurred lit spaces beneath.
The holy winds from Badaun,
My ancestral land, I feel within my parched soul,
And the scented air
Revives my thickening veins, dull pores and icy Arctic inside
A well-groomed body, i hear the banyan tree, once seen,
in my paternal grandfather’s outer compound, near the temple,
on the Patiala Sarai street, transports me back
to that home and community,
I hear the bells and evening chants
And a refreshed me—
Becomes a child again, in the presence
of the folks, now gone, yet
living!
@Sunil Sharma
A veritable melange of insight,memory and imagination that fuses the wistful with a nascent paean of praise to forebears.
A touching poem depicting two worlds, loss looming large over the parchrd breast.
This poem has such a deep aching nostalgia dripping out of every word and image of a time and a place loved passionately by the poet that it creates a sympathetic yearning for bygone days and lost home -places in the reader also