A Departure from the Referendum
That which came to rise upon the death of Amidst:
a forgiving moment which came to bless this arid land at last.
The journey plagued with discontent, and fallen limbs, and blood shed;
then the drone of sickness finds its way to the head—I collapse,
and it was right in:
a passage off a Beauvoir's book, or a quote of hers I’d hung up on the wall;
all that, in a veil of Sartrean ambiguity, and existentialist dread,
leading to error in the way that I deem, judge, and gauge context.
The steps I heard were from the left—heading right,
traversing past the unassuming ones, and mud on the floor.
Then a pile of books was made to fall on the table—and steps came to subside.
She went up-aboard her chariot, and addressed us lesser ones.
Yet the humility bespoke!
Attending to the crowd with sincerity, in good-will: passion,
a skill I’d deemed to be that which today is only rarely ever honed.
And at times when they fell victim to instincts:
immersing in unorderly banter, and quarrels.
I'd failed to realise the person I was in the attention of:
"Come to contest this woman in virtue, you celibate monks of the mountains!"
It'd only been a few days since the funeral,
and the Amidst was no longer in discussion, or a cause of my remorse.
It had served me well; the best it could,
and thrived with me all along:
Bringing in the scent of dying leaves as they fell in autumn, of rain in monsoon:
of plateaus that I once called home, in forever days.
“It never stops raining here, yet it's never enough!”,
A local said on my last trip to the place,
I however—who calls this temperate, fertile soil of the Himalayas home,
cannot escape to the humid coast, or the higher-arid ranges:
it’s the water that rushes, and boils under the sun on the way,
and the monsoon that is reverted by the mountains to my town:
these remote connections to the mountains fall as curse upon my will to change,
and the town perpetuates—with a singular refugee, residing under its stern-grace.
“The Amidst, the Evil Flowers, or the long-perpetuating Buddhist refuge,
now linger as though inseparable, as indents caused by time”
The animalistic lust comes to demean all but the aspects of preservation, and sex,
despite the ample opportunity to foster the mountainous spirit,
and the vast misery, and treachery of this land—
to win over a life of the empiricist spirit, of trial.
But I’d overlooked the predisposition I had,
I was doomed from the very start—I was a man of my culture, and creed after all.
Then it was the plains that I, out of necessity, called home again.
I seemed to have stood out to the woman after the first few days;
her scrutiny began to shed, as did the Sartrean veil cast upon my sight.
It came to crumble the grandiose image of Beauvoir I had in mind.
Seeing clearly was especially tough,
she’d offered me shelter from the First Skeptic Assault.
And this woman, would address us being fully collected,
establishing dignity in the undertone, and her ability to declare control,
all-the-while being singular and complete in every perceivable sense;
she fared to be finer than Beauvoir in this regard.
She responded with complete attention when I mustered up, and started to speak
half in the language of the higher ranks, and the rest in my unsophist tongue.
In the coming days she’d come to expect me to speak before her,
and address the unassuming ones,
of the conviction each one of them could boast:
learn the sophist tongue, their code of conduct, and their walk,
their etiquette, and bland culture-cuisine at large.
I left the congregation in the coming days, it was going too well, and too fast.
I had forgotten the ways of a learner
the very day I started to preach alongside her, to the blind crowd.
After long, I’d come to my senses—this wasn’t my home, just an interim abode.
I’d come to traverse through the process of humiliation again—
learning to inherit, not rage when proven wrong;
that was learning, and the way I’d done for long.
Animals fare off better in isolation, misery grants humility.
When I left the congregation, I didn’t tell her; I left all desire to attain,
and to seek solace in my inability to sustain solitude—
the hand that reached out the cave to seek refuge
only exposed itself half as much to the sun.
The progress was being made, the sun had one less creature to prey on.