Adreyo Sen- A Poem

Blindness

When you close your eyes

so as not to see the world,

the world doesn't see you,

save a curious child's glance or two,

alighting on a paper bag.

You were Beauty's shawl.  Having 

slipped from her wings,

you're a colorless stream,

a broken bench,

unmarked by those 

who pass unaware

they are moved 

by your loud silence

to solitude.

When you wish to see the world again,

it is difficult to open your eyes,

for you are everywhere, and yet

so much a lot of nothing,

the soda can in the spilling bin,

the tulip that cannot hear its sisters sing,

the raven adrift to sea, 

the jagged tear in a good man's shirt,

dampened with tears

that have a better claim to his affections.

Indeed if you are -

and you still don't know how -

to see again at all, it is best to remember

when you first saw the world,

not yet an unbeliever

in the happy sorrow of its colors,

a spectrum you once traced

with all the vigor of love

and being loved,

a memory throbbing like your left knee in winter.

For you are none the wiser

Fools seldom are.

Then

your eyes were not your own.

Perhaps they never did become.

They were hers.

So bright were they as they dreamt

of all you'd be

so bright were they as they saw you

in all the angry brilliance you'd achieve.

She saw it all.

Even when you were little, and tiny, and small, and mean,

not knowing how else to be.  Dear stupid thing!

And thus you were the great tear in her heart,

the fierce cough that still brings her

to the prayer of her knees.

Even now.

And so perhaps you'll be content - 

you don't really have a choice -

to be blind a little more,

to stumble back down the mountains you climbed,

and all the valleys you dug in your fear,

till, under the fierce protection of your tears, you crawl

into an anguish that is love

at its most terrifying and beautiful

and find yourself tossing up into sturdy arms

and brought sobbing to anchor

in a warmth you were once 

foolish enough to renounce.

And when you open your eyes,

you'll see the world once again.

For you never left it.

Though you did try so hard.

Darling fool.

Rest now.