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At midnight the moonlight comes in by a window,
it melts all over the quilt on my bed;
I am already wrapped in my shroud,
my bed is already my tomb.
Something within me is trying to vanish,
someone inside me is trying to leave,
but these are not my remains,
night after night I am living and dying;
my own corpse before me.
I lie on my back and I weep,
I mourn at my own funeral rite,
I am my own undying ghost,
I have roamed through half the graveyard,
each night I return from the pontless journey
, feet soaked by stygian waters.
But Death does not speak like this
from the pages of the upanishads,
there, Death is a mother's welcome
to a child returning from play.
The end is no intermission,
let me leave it once and for all,
I will play for so long before I return,
I will be so tired when I set down my load,
come, let us not regard this world
so darkly, just for a moment,
I have endured this life quietly,
suffering like a dumb beast.
How eager this flower is to fall,
how it longs to cut short the winter day,
to pass in a half-conscious night;
Death returns, defeated,
from the hands of life--
alas, Man does not die.
This is the twentieth century,
death is not easy or hard,
and so my eyes are eager
to open in pale morning light,
to crawl through life's listless day,
a day where no hope has its home.
The new age is lost on its way,
Time comes but makes all newness a void
before it can reach my door,
so Time passes through me as before,
it saddens all those who are happy,
it cheers all those who are sad,
but my indifference is a full stop
to the desires of life:
it strikes all changes dumb.
It is laughable:
as if governed by regular rules,
lizards continue to run to and fro
with regiments of ants
on the four walls of this room:
each plank of the floor is wondering why
this burden upon it never gets up or goes,
it lives, but it is lifeless,
it hardly moves;
this irritation should be thrown out.
A snail can feed without reaching its goal,
but I cannot; so when I am gone,
do not think that anything great is lost;
the warmth of the small space I filled
will simply cool as I grow cold.
Apart of my blanket, the edge of my quilt,
will know that a lightweight existence,
a living helplessness, have fled away;
I shall come to my end before dying,
so many have died, but not ended:
but I wish for no preservation:
although the Himal ever melts at Gangotri,
and never ceases to be,
I must die, and see myself ended.
What claim can I make to be human?
A fistful of weary flesh,
a little bundle of tired bones:
that is all, and what of it?
-Mrityuka Angalama
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