MOHIT MITRA Poet Blank verse

Octaves of Love

—Heaven Remembered—

It did not enter through the gates of blood
nor by the warm consent of breathing flesh,
but farther in, where the first pressures move
beneath the root of matter, there began
a dark propulsion through the ribs of earth
from which even night inherited its fire.

Before the tongue had learnt the weight of grief,
before the lungs grew burdened with the world,
something unnamed broke inward through the dark
and taught the void to suffer radiance. Not God—
or not the little king of laws and gold
whom frightened men assemble out of dust—
but that from which the thought of God first rose.

For love was never tenderness alone.
The lamb may bear it; so may plague and iron.
It is the wound by which creation climbs
beyond the appetite of dust. I saw,
one winter in a harvested field, a woman
kneeling beside a dying hound while snow
descended soundlessly through thorn and furrow.

No heaven stirred. She broke her bread and placed
it in the creature’s mouth, and when its jaws
closed on her wounded hand she did not move.
Then something in the visible world changed—
not vanished, not appeared, but grew so still
the frost itself seemed held within attention.
Even the crows withdrew into the air
as though the night had entered them with awe.

I cannot tell what passed through that hour.
It was as though all grief denied a voice—
the labourer asleep in soot and rain,
the mother bent above a fevered child,
the exile carrying his extinguished tongue—
had gathered underneath the living ground
and risen slowly through the roots of things
until the trees grew listening in their bark.

There are octaves in love no speech can cross
without surrendering its name, vast intervals
where joy grows grave beyond the reach of time
and grief, completing itself, becomes light.
There the soul learns the stars are not cold fires
but wounds through which eternity breaks open.

Therefore let empires sharpen their decrees
and scholars lock the heavens into systems;
one act of mercy done without witness
outlives the monumental speech of kings.
The galaxies themselves are less immense
than one brief human hand refusing cruelty.

And this I know now with unanswering peace:
the stars are not sustained by fire alone.
There is a deeper covenant than darkness
by which all broken things continue on.
Even the abyss, at its most silent, is listening.
And all existence leans toward love.

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