Life is an Enigma … Kopparthy
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Man must survive.
Even if death is inviolable,
Man should last as long as he can.
Living is a wonderful process…
To live with the consciousness of being alive
and vitality of spirit is a feat…
Possible only with man
Living is a grace, an elegance
A yearning, an adventure
Sadly, life is… an overpowering painful infatuation.
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To sustain life is a challenge alike vanquishing Time.
It’s a polite defiance of the Sun, the Moon, the stars
And, the whole of creation.
It’s like getting an extended lease over
Few more dawns and bright moonlit autumnal nights.
Man sustaining his life is a challenge
Akin to vanquishing Time.
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Sun is deemed alive
Only when man wakes up from his sleep;
Stars’ twinkle get noticed
Only when man looks up to watch;
Just… and just for that, man should be alive.
One must prolong the life of a man
Hovering between life and death, by a moment;
And for that moment
The whole humanity should stake all its resources.
To the question “Of what use is this lease?”
I would answer: “To keep the world alive for one more moment.”
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No moment matches its bygone predecessor
Nor any moment is premature to its successor
Like you can’t take a dip in a flowing water
One can’t live the same moment twice
And even the centurion had lived
The hundredth year once,
And for the first time … too.
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Alas!
If words impregnated with life
Can’t speak about life, it’s just dumbness;
If looks invested with life
Can’t find life, it’s just blindness;
And if a heart sensitive to life
Can’t found life in itself, it’s just senselessness.
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Who called Life a flame, and who refuted it?
Who said Life is a solid and who, it’s a liquid?
Who accounted Life as singular, and who, as plural?
But who called Life, Life in the first place?
Once it became impossible to find it
Spite of pervading the whole being of man,
It became clear that Life is
An unintelligible insular hermetic secret !
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Yet, I wanted to ask the five elements
Pray the flowers, birds, the natal children
What life is;
Blame my life partner till I go hoarse
Who partnered me for life…
Yet, never revealed the nature of Life.
On a clear cloudless evening
Stretching both my hands to the sky
I want to ask the yonder infinite darkness
That dyed the endless vacuum with azure
To give me a cue if Life had any hue;
In the wee hours of some wintry dawn
I want to walk about the green grassy meadows alone
And urge the enveloping fog stretching across to tell me
If it were a “proto” of life.
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Apprehending at what unexpected moment, or
Through what gesture or sound
Nature would reveal that eluding secret of Life,
I wanted to make friendship with
Every animate and the inanimate existing.
I wanted to render the trilling of birds
The signs of flora, the roaring of cataracts,
And the expansive silence of mountains
Into human language.
To catch the wrong side of last instance
When life spills into death
I am rehearsing to catch
The last second I slip into sleep.
If Life were an alchemy
I want to implore the poet and poetry
To unveil its secret.
I want to beseech the traveller
Who strayed across the city limits of Life,
But came back safe,
To whisper into my ear
What was seen on the other side of the border.
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When nobody speaks on its behalf,
Life has to speak about itself;
And has to unveil itself.
I want approach Life to explain
Its secret behind being everywhere yet nowhere.
And again,
I want to accost Life to comment
On the surprising absence of man,
More than his presence.
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