Reflections

Thanks to a friend, I happened to read a poem by Pablo Neruda after a long time! And it just reminded me of how much more attention poetry by him demands! Here are a few poems by Neruda that I particularly like. I would have given a detailed explanation as to why but I guess his poems do the talking themselves! Tonight I can write the saddest lines. Write, for example, 'The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.' The night wind revolves in the sky and sings. Tonight I can write the saddest lines. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too. Through nights like this one I held her in my arms. I kissed her again and again under the endless sky. She loved me, sometimes I loved her too. How could one not have loved her great still eyes. Tonight I can write the saddest lines. To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her. To hear the immense night, still more immense without her...

Lean and lanky, he sat at his badly lit study table. He had spent most part of his youth and his entire old age in the same place, in front of the same bundle of papers, which would have once been blank, but now were a confused mess of mathematical symbols and philosophical meanderings. The batteries of his table lamp had long ago given up, but too busy to change them, he chose to carry on, letting the lamp shade accumulate dirt and his spectacles, a higher power. The cushion of his chair had sunk deep inside by the unmoving weight of his body. His fatigued mind could not remember the date of when it all started but his objective was still as crystal clear to him, as it had been then. He had embarked on the search for a separate identity, trying to defy the mathematical theorem of “Uniqueness of Identity”. “There is only one identity which is unique”. There has to be a way to finding another identity, a separate identity. Or so he thought. The Indo- Pak war, the Canadian War, the ne...