MOHIT MITRA Poet Blank verse

Face to Flame

—The Temper of Water—

O cunning fire, if thou hast steel enough,
then come without the pan between our names;
lay thy red argument upon my skin,
and make no vessel of the distance there.
For what is courage if it needs a wall
to keep its hunger from becoming pain?
Come nearer. Boil me where I am—and know
that water does not yield because it burns;
it alters what the flame believed was there.

I have seen fire take the colour of command
when winter made the fingers of a man
too stiff to fasten one small button;
I have seen a child hold out his hands
above a brazier, smiling at the heat
as though the world had briefly told the truth.
I have watched rain strike a railway line
and vanish, not defeated, but transformed—
its body passing upward without witness.

So taste me face to face.

Do not mistake
the steam for surrender. What escapes the wound
may be the part of me no furnace owns.
A thing may disappear before the eye
and yet enlarge its kingdom in the air;
the unseen is not the vanquished form,
but substance freed from having to be seen.

Thou hast thy heat. I have my depth.
Between us stands no sanctioned intermediary—
no polished shield, no courteous distance,
no cold device to make the meeting safe.
Let force encounter force until the lie
that power is measured by the wound it makes
has nowhere left to stand.

For I have learned, through years that left no scar
where strangers thought the scars must be, that strength
is not the hand which closes hardest round
the throat of what it cannot comprehend.
Nor is the victor he who leaves behind
a silence shaped exactly like his blow.

Come, then.

Let thy red sovereignty descend.
Let every hidden atom hear thy claim.
I shall not praise thee for the heat thou bringest,
nor curse thee for the pain thou canst command.
I shall receive thee with the ancient law
by which the elements disclose themselves:
fire by consuming, water by becoming.

And when thy brilliance has exhausted speech,
when all thy gold has spent itself against
the patience of the substance thou wouldst master,
thou mayst discover—if discovery be
a word large enough for what will then occur—
that I was never asking thee to spare me.

I asked thee to come without a shield.

For only face to face can fire discover
what every flame conceals until it touches
the thing it thought too weak to answer it.

And then the water does not conquer.

It remains.

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