Opeth-o-Graphy

Prologue:

When, stands a moor under the weeping moon,

What thinks he? Ah, but does he think at all,

Of orchid, birds, his forests? And maroon

His land, the moor, his home, as stars befall.

Stays back, the night and the silent water

To stranger lands with promises of hope,

Charges for absent friends, clad in otter,

A silhouette, bleak, fading down the slope.

The drapery falls, bares a mystic sun.

Afresh, they wake up to rid the disease

The weakness, for but good, to be undone

By that horse rider, melting with the breeze.

Yonder he left, say they, yonder he drove

Apostle in triumph, with valor, the cove

Yes. Everything there is surreal. Another still day, beneath the sun. What had the fortunes brought me to? A lasting impression of what should have been, interspersed with the hope of these idyllic images race through an empty mind. Hitting hard with every impact. There had been those war-mongrels, ravaging my lands, and here are these complaisant, congenial folks, welcoming me into their hearts. This is not Karma. I had left for a cause, and here I stand, refusing to accept this denouement. Ways of the world, say they. How am I to tell myself apart from   those I had come for? I need not. In the quest of chasing away my demons, I'd come a long way ahead. In fact, left them far behind.

I tread along, in the devil’s orchard, or so I think, eying every movement with suspicion, every slither with hostility. And in the midst of all this, sparing a moment or two for my place. In every hustle through that harlequin forest, I find a raison d’etre for my presence; and in every tranquil moment, relive a lifetime in the watershed of her love. In this relentless journey for deliverance, I have found a way or two to go back, beneath the mire of this manufactured repugnance, and hide myself in the garment of her passion. Does her love check my advent into the unknown or does it give me a rationale to continue with this pursuit? For little that I know of this pursuit, I find comfort in that she kissed me goodbye under the white cluster of our reveries.

In the mist she was standing, quiet, privy.

Her porcelain heart, absent to the world,

Lay bare, carving patterns in the ivy.

Dew of her youth, silken, as it unfurled.

And smothers, his face, the dripping nectar

Of her flesh, as he lies dumbfounded there.

And finds the moments breaking the specter

Of the smog, into a form that’s so rare.

Benighted, oblivious beneath the sky

They render a touch in credence, in trust

“To bid you farewell”, he whispers his sigh

She chooses silence, and silence she must

April, ethereal, obscures in time,

Those hours of wealth, the twosome, sublime.

Staring down the memory lane, everything comes back a full circle, this is what people say. They say you are always running away from what you were, from what was to what you were and what was. How difficult, rather rare, it is to find newer things and not connect them to things you have left behind! Memory after all is a beautiful thing, although not a twin, but still, a relative to truth; a heritage that leaves you only poorer. And how callous a thing, to betray your true state of mind with wishful longing for the absent.

Coming to think of it, there was no particular reason why I thought I should leave my land. As the harvest season progresses, so does my mind waver from one pursuit to another. I am already a part of this rich cultural exuberance, with only a quaint memory of the autumn when I left for the unknown. And nothing bothers me, particularly. They have taken kindly to me, unknowledgeable of my identity. For myself, I had no reason then, and not one now. As a matter of fact, I do not even know if they are the same demons, of the fall, as my people called them. Every sunset, I sing a madrigal or two with them, and with every folklore, wish to break free of that unkempt feeling of self-condemnation of not having found stable, mental peace. I realize that I am losing any desire of going back to my place, into that forest of October and instead, want to live an unassuming life here, only thinking that the ravager would not be ravaged.