MOHIT MITRA Poet Blank verse

Wind's North

—Where the Heart Has No Compass—


I know not where the wandering wind departs,
Nor what deep ordinance directs its breath;
It leaves the hills and enters vacant blue,
Where every chart dissolves beneath its wing.
I lift my hands, yet know not what they seek;
The prayer ascends before the tongue can speak;
My thought falls short of what my hands invoke,
While still the wind proceeds beyond my ken.

The heart enthrones the one whom it adores,
As though its vows could make the hours withstand;
We bind the flesh with adamantine vows,
Yet cannot know what hour shall loose the clasp.
The future veils its countenance from us,
Yet makes the present seem beyond recall.

I saw two lovers seated in the dusk,
So near that silence travelled breath to breath;
A word lay captive in the throat and grew
More weighty through its exile from the air.
The face beside me once was known as home,
Till hidden change made what was known seem strange;
Then what we named as ours became unknown,
And wounds arose before we knew their cause.

It enters where the heart has hoarded light,
And shifts the inward chambers of the blood.
I take the words that cannot reach your lips,
And lead them through the furnace of my verse,
Till silence crosses the dark verge of speech
And takes a shape no mortal tongue can name;
Thus what was mute assumes its form in song.

And you, whom I had trusted past belief,
Whose nearness was the grammar of release,
Whose absence made the starry heavens strange,
I deemed your hands possessed the hidden word
That might disclose the physic of this wound;
I thought the one I raised beyond the stars
Knew what might heal the kingdom of the heart.

But you knew not; nor did the stars above.
My lifted hands returned to me unchanged;
Yet something broke the dark and would not die.
The wound grew eyes and gazed into my own,
And there the world appeared without its veil:
Not healed, not heard, yet wholly present there.
I wrote, and let the unknown thing remain.

The wind went on; I did not ask its way.
It left no road, yet something passed through me;
It moved where grief had sealed its secret gate,
And made the nameless inward country speak.
The thing I called an ending changed its face;
The loss I named grew deeper into sight.
No answer came; the heavens gave no sign.
I ceased to ask the wind where it would go.

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