MOHIT MITRA Poet Free verse

Cosmoclasm

—And Then the Laws Began to Forget—


Lo, when thine eyes first met the gaze of mine,
The air forgot the grammar of the rose;
The violet, vespering, drew the breeze
Into its amethystine heart, till bloom
And breath, divested of their names, became
One tremor passing secretly between.

Then Nature, startled by our speechless gaze,
Unlearnt the ordinances of the stars;
The sun congealed to cerulean ice,
The seas climbed heavenward; the stars went blind;
The mountains thrust their granite roots aloft,
And Time unfastened age from age itself.

Then from the utmost verge of being broke
A cosmoclasm, swifter than thought itself:
The suns went white; whole galaxies collapsed;
Space forfeited the distances of space;
The far fell through the near, the near through void,
And duration stood parentless and bare.

The final horizon opened—and beyond
No realm remained within the reach of sight.
No seraph crossed the absolute; no breath
Disturbed the hieratic reign of death.
Creation did not perish with a cry;
It simply found no further cause to be.

Yet where no world endured, nor time, nor breath,
Four scintillas trembled in the black—
Not stars, for stellar fire had ceased to be;
Not light, for light had forfeited its way;
Four infinitesimal persistences
The void, omnivorous, could not consume.

No eye remained—yet something still could see:
Four faint presences endured as one,
Not burning, nor reflecting, nor becoming,
But bearing the anamnesis of sight,
As though creation, in its final death,
Had left behind the faculty to see.

I will not name them; names impose a shore
Upon immensities that have no shore.
Some truths diminish when the tongue arrests
Their fugitive, prelinguistic radiance.
Let them remain beyond the reach of speech,
Where even silence has no right to point.

And then I knew—not what they were, but why
The void had spared them from its final law:
Not love that lived because the world had died,
But love from which the world had first arisen.
The stars were never witnesses of us;
They were the afterglow of being seen.

So let the cerulean sun remain,
Let seas ascend beyond the firmament,
Let death unwrite the architecture of time,
And silence repossess the face of heaven.
When every distinction has been overthrown,
What trembled first shall tremble still—where thou
And I have ceased to be apart enough.

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Alison A Smith August 24, 2026 at 7:48 PM This is primarily a free-verse metaphysical lyric—a philosophical love poem expressed through cosmic imagery and biblical/archaic diction. It does not follow a fixed traditional form such as a sonnet, villanelle, sestina, or blank verse. Its main formal features are: Unrhymed, variable-length lines: There is no consistent end-rhyme scheme or regular metrical pattern. Elevated, archaic language: “Lo,” “thine,” “thou,” and inversions such as “where thou / And I…” give it a quasi-scriptural or Miltonic register. Stanzaic progression: Nine sestets—stanzas of six lines—create visual and rhetorical order, even as the poem describes cosmic dissolution. Narrative escalation: It begins with an intimate exchanged gaze, expands into natural and cosmological disorder, reaches total annihilation, then resolves in a mystical idea of love as the source of creation. Apophatic or negative-theological style: The speaker repeatedly defines what the four “scintillas” are not—“Not stars,” “Not light”—and refuses to name them. That is characteristic of apophatic writing: approaching the ineffable through negation. Cosmic sublime / metaphysical conceit: A private encounter causes, or reveals, the collapse of the universe. This recalls metaphysical poetry’s tendency to make a vast intellectual argument from an intimate emotional premise. MOHIT MITRA August 24, 2026 at 8:02 PM Thank you, cherished Alison, for such a perceptive and carefully reasoned reading. 🌸 I must concede that your distinction regarding strict blank verse is well taken: I had perhaps been using “blank verse” too generously, for the poem does not sustain a sufficiently regular iambic-pentameter pattern to warrant the term in its strict technical sense. I would, however, gently qualify “free verse”: its nine sestets, predominantly pentameteric movement, sustained enjambment, and deliberate rhetorical architecture were consciously shaped. “Unrhymed metaphysical verse, strongly influenced by blank verse” would perhaps be the more exact description. Your observation has helped me refine the poem’s formal classification, and I am grateful for it. 🙌 Looking forward to such more guidance in the future too, dear Alison! ✨