The Old Moon and Imperiled Panorama
Pallid rays of this pale moon
had grown old so soon
during that half hour before the morning twilight,
It was a chilly, clear-skied, frosty, fogless January night,
The moon just a night away from fullness
had been exceptionally bright.
Nightlong, almost near the acme of its beauty
it had fulfilled its luminous duty,
Its milky beams had over-lighted
or overshadowed many a star,
It seemed eager to blot out
every stain and tainting tar,
Its beams falling like snows
upon sleeping horizon to the far,
The beautiful plains of this countryside
were lying in sleepy abundance
under the milky, chilly blanket with slumberous pride,
Everything was open to this celestial torch
with nothing to hide,
Cold-basking fields were huddled under their croppy sheets;
above was gloating the marvelous moon-shine,
Wheatlings stood bow-headed in reverence
with dewy crown fine,
Those marigold flowers were shining
unabashed under the milky showers,
The flowers happy about
losing their colors to the lover’s
mysterious smiles and its powers,
White pea flowers boasted their augmented whiteness,
Aha, such dolefully beneficent had been the brightness,
Even trees didn’t seem dark, indistinct specters
lurking shadowily over the horizon,
They appeared boats of foliage
floating in a misty sea,
In the background of such a brightly lit stage
even the sky seemed earth-lorn,
Through the milky transparency
its bluish-black veil lurked and through it
only the brightest stars smiled,
Scattered in the docile swathes of this
moon-baked countryside
villages seemed like mammoth ships silently
floating in the white wavy sea of light.
The moon was now well past its prime,
as if in shining too bright it had committed a crime,
Its setting quarter was in the north-west,
where the moony panorama had shone best,
And now it was moving towards rest,
Its strength and vigor had
dangerously plummeted down,
It now seemed ogling with a
meek, angry, anguished, helpless frown,
Its brightness was fastly fading out
And its yellowish pale rays
appeared eager for a wailing shout,
Glumly it was fading over those sandy undulation
carrying fields, furrows, crops on its gently unfolding dome,
Shiny fruits born of sweat-laden efforts in its sandy loam,
Accusingly the moon threw pale, protesting
shadows in south-east,
where urbanism, consumption and crass commercialist
blatantly had its seat commanding, metropolitan, capitalist feast,
The area had been earmarked
for some merciless development project,
It now being defined by a tiny space
bound in a map issued under
the state government’s gazetted notification,
What a mischief by the developmental hand!
Ever eager to bulldoze over nature
and turn it into uncomplaining, lifeless sand,
where lustrous stones will be built over nature’s burial,
Oofs! How heartless, wanton and depraved!
This pale, mournful moon
which was to set soon
into the misty gloom of twilight,
when a bright sun of consumerism and commerce
was ascending to its dawning height,
Those stalks of reeds
which sway in the cold breeze without greeds
seemed gently bidding the moon a good-bye,
Plummeted which further down
with a swollen face and a sigh,
Its pallid face grimacing with a painful nostalgia,
Its fading, setting rays tainted with deadly paleness;
Its oblong, teary face
now looked at this landscape,
Sleepy fields, warmthful wastes and fellow lands,
What mighty lessons have been taught here!
Aha! The farmer going to the fields with his gear,
Those long, painful, sometimes fruitless days
subsided when the sun’s eager rays
looking at the sweat’s trove
and the shirt’s hoe,
Where the long painful dark nights
arrived like the deeds accomplished,
Where the failures galore
but the hardwork never bored,
These failures defined success
as the losses stood just as a testimony to the profits,
Where hopes, aspirations and desires
varied with the changing hues of weather,
Farmer pawning everything
for the feathers in destiny’s crown,
Gold forms immaterially—
or minimally at the rate of a dust speck for a gram—
in the toiled soil brown,
All will be gone,
The moon was also dying with a moan,
This beautiful charming mystery of the landscape—
why hardest labor fetches minimal returns;
and why a bit less harder toil results in
a soul-satisfying speckful of return that seems wealthiest—
All this beautiful, aesthetic, curvy, circuiting strings;
Mysteries of landscape, of destiny,
of the see-saw battle between pleasure and pain,
between penury and sustainable as well as gluttonous gain,
between life and death:
All this will be lost for a direct, straight,
materially penetrating needle of surety,--
The commercial, unflinching and fixed
use of the landscape
in the form of concrete approach
where profits will boomerang
in proportion to the short-cuts;
Where compromised morality, ideology and conscience
will not face any ifs and buts;
Where there will not be any sweet scent
of labor that will be replaced by
the mechanical, greasy, muddy panting
of merciless competition and grab;
Where concrete blocks, flats will replace
these wonderous solitudes basking in and around;
Where sheaves, stalks, straw and reeds
will not sway to the breeze,
but blank, rigid, ironed tower
will stand mutely, inflexibly to the nature’s cooing calls.
Now the sorrowfully yellowing
death rattle of the setting time
was arriving with a chime.
There on the opposite horizon the day opened a window
to sneak a peek at the imperiled room of night,
Wispily, there was the twilight
with its mixed day-night delight,
In its mysterious lap,
the old moon met a slightly premature death,
Slumped as it feebly, freely
into the silvery sea of mist
standing still over the treeline.
Into this sea of death, the moon plunged,
And the twilight mischievously winked
with it unfaithful, teasing look asking favors
both from the night and the day,
The old moon was gone with its last ray,
And soon-to-be-doomed panorama,
unmindful of the fatality waiting,
came out of its dewy slumber,
A crane’s clarion call
cree….ked over its yawning breast,
The sun prepared to cast its first ray
and the fields got up for another hard farming day.
PS—Time of the poem: Half hour before the morning twilight of January 13, 2006 (Lohri); a day before the full moon day (Makar Sakranti, January 14).
