Friday 27 November 2009

A Letter

For days it was as if I never existed.
You have blotted me out of your world
Like a wilted flower from your vase.

I have treasured our unuttered pledges:
Rising with your name as a prayer on my lips,
Breathing the morning breeze,
Marveling,
Oh God,
Isn’t this the same fragrance my dear one breathes!

I waited beneath your window last night,
My heart aflutter in the moonlight
For a rustle at the curtain,
The fleeting glimpse of a shadow...

Throughout you kept it shut.

*****

(This is another poem from my teenage days, when I was terribly in love with a girl, who, as it turned out, became my life partner subsequently. Slightly edited because of the age factor and my present status as a grandfather.)

*****

11 comments:

Kalpana Bindu said...

So poetry, it seems was there althrough!

P. Venugopal said...

you mean to say, what i had written so far was not poetry? only this one nearabouts passes the grade?

Sumi Mathai said...

oh wow.very very beautiful.

Musings said...

reminds me of a similar act I had done from my window LOL..

P. Venugopal said...

when you fall in love, one of the things you do is to go out on moonlit nights to watch the shrine where the deity sleeps. but keep an eye on the movements of the night patrol also. very unromantic people, the constabulary.

Kalpana Bindu said...

no no i did no mean that at all. I just meant that you began wrting poetry long back :-) I really liked this poem

P. Venugopal said...

i was only joking, Kalpana. yes, i was writing poetry from long back. from age eight or nine when i first fell in love, i was writing poetry. i was doing this till the age of 22 when i ultimately found my love coming to fruition with my marriage to the fifth girl i had fallen in love with in my career so far, the subject behind the closed window in the present poem. with marriage i fell into a stunned silence that was to last till the age of around 50. now i am picking up the bits and pieces of the old poet from here and there and limping back to the writing table.

Charu said...

Amazing... its lovely...

Prabhakar said...

The birth of a grandchild makes you young again, isn't it. Pl. post more of your very fine love poetry.

P. Venugopal said...

dear Prabhakar,
it will destroy all the image i had carefully built up of myself through this blog if i do so.
together, husband and wife, we had burnt most of the poetic exchanges between us some ten years into our married life when my daughter started growing up. there were no blogs those days, only the Indian Postal Service. letters and a 300-page notebook of poems, too dangerous to be left around in the house. only a few of them survive, the ones that show me in the most compromising situation imaginable, which my wife had secretly saved from the fire, probably with the intention of blackmailing me at a future date.
i was going through them yesterday. after some vigorous editing job, i would like to post some of them on the blog on the condition that my friends would not hold it against me. frankly, i am not as insane as i sound in those pieces.

Prabhakar said...

Dear Venu, don't be shy. go ahead!