After the death of a friend

Fotografia Olho de Gato

Over, the kite’s flight; and of a sudden

is the realization of the morning overcome 

by the echo of dark nights, silent witness

to the colorlessness crouching down before us. 

Stealing time is what’s been happening all the time. 

Is it because you’ve heard only your own cries,

fifty years earlier, too, as they went by, adulterated with death?

Or some shy, crumpled laughter carrying with it 

the air of an unspoken but certain defeat?

Somewhere in my mind, I lose the ability

to disappear, as the morning air moves listlessly about, 

indifferent to looks, or history, or roots. And here

if I died, like this, dying for the person I was,

or for the one I see coming in and out of your death, 

would that be a way out to save me

from the solitude I’ve believed in and pursued

in the same way I pursue the rush of blood in my veins?

There is so much we’ve begun to pile upon you, more

than all the lives we’ve had and have lost. Nothing whatever 

burns to ash. Years pass. Days, wisdom, the simple sadness.

A slow-moving ray of sunlight walks me backward 

to a past turned magical by the virtue of its emptiness, 

this part of myself that never fails to embrace us. 

Jayanta Mahapatra