DEATH Poem: The autumn we survived, by Shelly Bhoil

(in remembrance of family and friends gone during pandemic)

Pandemic – the human tree in a deep autumnal phase
shedding what wasn’t dated, what was yet to be
and even what was not to be

our conventions of un-belonging to places
where we truly belong are but shallow
(the lotus in the mud isn’t no mud in the lotus)

lest we fall in the pit of nihilism, utterly incapable of
drinking from cup of the ‘wisdom of emptiness’—
the ultimate Shangri-La in its bottom

when fever rises on the forehead, the moon lights up the valley of
lost memories haunted by echoes of songs in language of
a civilization long wiped off from the face of earth

gradually we slip under the duvet of night, and when comes mother death
licking our wounds, caressing us to sleep, we bend around and cross
ourselves in the ever-gyrating cycle of our amnesic lives