MOHIT MITRA Poet Other

After the Road

—The Virtues I Could Not Bear—



He bore those virtues I had schooled my heart
To flout—the mercy tardive as a bell
That tolls when judgement hath already writ
Its iron sentence; and the fortitude
That, having neither warrant nor reprieve,
Still stood, as though endurance were decree.

His papers sodden, rain-black at the cuffs,
He watched the departing omnibus grow small;
Defeat had docketed him among the lost,
Yet some unlicensed morning stirred in him—
A pertinacious ember without name,
Which would not let the ruin have the last word.

A rumour traversed the town ere Truth
Had found her raiment, fastened up her throat;
By vesper it had gathered testimonial,
By night, a hundred tongues had canonised
Its falsehood. Truth came mud-foot, unadorned,
And found the lie enthroned where fact should sit.

I watched him exhaust the stratagems—
The specious plea, the venial compromise,
The facile alibi by which we varnish
Our abdications into innocence;
Till every avenue of self-release
Lay shuttered—and he chose the steeper way.

I had imagined triumph a resplendent
Heraldry, some aureate certification
Affixed to what the world elects as worthy;
His triumph was the wreckage underneath:
Each failure divested him of borrowed names,
Each rising made the ruin less his own.

Then, inexplicably, the firmament
Descended—not as vision, but as fact:
The stars lay rooting underneath our feet,
And darkness flowered upward through the stone.
I understood no doctrine, only this—
The road was not discovered. It was made.

Let Hell prolong its jurisdiction; let
The false arrive before the true, and let
Our virtues wound the very hands that bear them.
We are not promised passage, nor reprieve;
Yet where the last conceivable way is closed,
the footfall itself becomes the road.

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