The Old Moon and Imperiled Panorama

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).