Gaurav Sagar > Recent Status Updates

“Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.”


― Honoré de Balzac

The Sucide:

Not a single star will be left in the night.
The night will not be left.
I will die and, with me,
the weight of the intolerable universe.
I shall erase the pyramids, the medallions,
the continents and faces.
I shall erase the accumulated past.
I shall make dust of history, dust and dust.
Now I am looking on the final sunset.
I am hearing the last bird.
I bequeath nothingness to no one.

In the praise of Darkness:

Old age (the name that others give it)
can be the time of our greatest bliss.
The animal has died or almost died.
The man and his spirit remain.
I live among vague, luminous shapes
that are not darkness yet.

The forms and colors of my dreams have changed:
now there are red houses side by side
and the fragile bronze of the dying leaves
and the chaste winter and the righteous firewood.
As on the seventh day, the earth is good.
Deep in the twilight something carries on
that nearly does not exist, bold and sad,
an old murmur of Bibles of war.

We are Oedipus and everlastingly
we are long tripartite beast; we are
all that we were and will be, nothing less.
It would destroy us to look steadily
at our full being. Mercifully God grants us
the ticking of the clock, forgetfulness.

From all the generation of past roses,
Disintegrated in the depths of time,
I want one to be spared oblivion-
One unexceptional rose from all the things
that once existed. Destiny allows me
The privilege of choosing, this first time,
That silent flower, the very final rose
That Milton held before his face, but could
Not see. O rose, vermilion or yellow
Or white, from some obliterated garden

The Dagger
It is more than a thing of metal. Man dreamed it up and fashioned it for
a very precise purpose. In some eternal way, it is the
same dagger that killed a man a Tacurembo,
the same daggers that did Caesar to death. Its will is
to kill, to spill sudden blood.

In a desk drawer, among rough drafts and letters, the dagger
endlessly dreams its simple tiger's dream, and grasping it
the hand comes alive

To look at the river made of time and water
And remember that time is another river,
To know that we are lost like the river
And the faces dissolve like water.

To be aware that waking dreams it is not asleep
While it is another dream, and that the death
That our flesh goes in fear of is that death
Which comes every night and is called sleep.

The light of one afternoon now passes,
Through the window, wavering, enfolding
The vaunted book, and once again its golden
Trappings flare and are reduced to ashes.

In that great hall the silent book, alone,
Travels into time. The morning light
Is left behind; it joins the hours of night
And life, another fleeting dream, my own.

The Hourglass:

The sand of every cycle is the same
and infinite is the history of sand;
so, underlying your fortunes and your sorrows,
yawns an invulnerable eternity.

It never stops, the spilling of the sand.
I am the one who weakens, not the glass.
The rite of the falling sand is infinite
and, with the sand, our lives are leaving us.

Here once again the memorable lips, unique and like yours.
I kept getting close to happiness and have stood in the shadow of suffering.
I have crossed the sea.
I have known many lands; I have seen one woman and two or three men.
I have loved a girl who was fair and proud, with a Spanish quietness.
I have seen the city's edge, an endless sprawl where the sun goes down tirelessly, over and over.

Break of Day:

In the deep night of the universe
scarcely contradicted by the streetlamps
a lost gust of wind
has offended the taciturn streets
like the trembling premonition
of the horrible dawn that prowls
the ruined suburbs of the world.
Curious about the shadows
and daunted by the threat of dawn,
I recalled the dreadful conjecture
of Schopenhauer and Berkeley
which declares that the world

Ah, how fresh the morning of arrivals are,
And how pallid the morning of departures,
When our insides tighten into a ball
And a vague sensation akin to fear
-The ancestral fear of leaving what we know and going away,
Makes us shrink in our skin with anxiety.
And the whole of our anguished body, as it were our soul,
feels an inexplicable desire to feel all this
In some other way.

RICARDO REIS:

Freedom-

Of the gods I ask only to be ignored.
Without good or bad luck, I'll be free,
Like the wind that's the life
Of the air, which is nothing.
Hatred and love both seek us out;
Both oppress us, each in its own way.
Those to whom the gods
Grant nothing are free.

The Chess Players:

Let serious things scarcely matter to us
And grave things weigh little,
And let the natural drive of instincts yield
To the futile pleasure
(In the peaceful shade of the trees)
Of playing a good game.

Whatever we take from this useless life,
Be it glory or fame,
Love, science, or life itself,
It's worth no more
Than the memory of a well played game
And a match won

Beyond the bend in the road
There may be a well, and there may be a castle,
And there may be just more road.
I don't know and don't ask.
As long as I'm on the road that's before the bend
I look only at the road before the bend,
Because the road before the bend is all I can see.
It would do me no good to look anywhere else
Or at what I can't see.
Let's pay attention only to where we are.

Strikingly honest, apt for everyone who writes!!

In this way or that way,
As it may happen or not happen,
Sometimes succeeding in saying what I think
And at other times saying it badly and with things mixed in,
I keep writing my poems, inadvertently,
As if writing were not something requiring action,
As if writing were something that happens to me
In the same way that the sun reaches me from outside.

Wow!

Sometimes, on days of perfect and exact light,
When things are as real they can possibly be,
I slowly ask myself
Why I even bother to attribute
Beauty to things.

Does a flower really have beauty?
Does a fruit really have beauty?
No: they have only color and form
And existence.
Beauty is the name of something that doesn't exist
But that I give to things an exchange for the pleasure they give me.

I could leave her lying on the street and simply not finish the story. But no: I'll go on to where the air runs out, I'll go on to where the void begins to curve, I'll go where my breathes takes me. Does my breath deliver me to God? I am so pure that I know nothing. I only know one thing: I don't need to pity God. Or do I?

It's better for me not to speak of happiness or unhappiness- it provokes that swooning longing and lilac, that violet perfume, the chilly waters of the gentle tide in foam upon the sand. I don't want to provoke because it hurts.

He didn't tell her that he'd stolen it int the factory washroom: another worker had left it by the sink while he was washing his hands. Nobody found out, he was a true technician of theft: he didn't wear wristwatch to work.

If I think about it: who isn't fluke in life. As for me, I've only escaped from being a fluke because I write, which is an act that is a fact. That is when I enter into contact with inner powers of mine, I find through myself your God. Why do I write? What do I know? No idea. Yes, it's true, I sometimes think that I'm not me, I seem to belong to a distant galaxy because I'm so strange to myself. Is it me ?

So she didn't feel unhappy. The only thing she wanted was to live. She didn't know for what, she didn't ask questions. Maybe she thought there was a little bitty glory in living. She thought people had to be happy. So she was. before her birth was she an idea? Before her birth was she dead? And after her birth she would die? What a thin slice of watermelon.

I sat upon shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my hands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s'ascose nel feco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon - O swallow swallow
Le Prince d'Acquitaine a la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

I sat upon shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my hands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s'ascose nel feco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon - O swallow swallow
Le Prince d'Acquitaine a la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

I sat upon shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my hands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s'ascose nel feco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon - O swallow swallow
Le Prince d'Acquitaine a la tour alolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

The Fire of Sermon:

Unreal city
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a packet full of currants
C.i.f. London: documents at sight,
Asked me in demotic French
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.

A Dawn

Lilacs were blooming,
Dew drops were fading away,
As if they never stay
Dreams were passing away
Taking along
Bliss closed eyes convey.

And as eyes were opening up
Tears were rolling down
What is it with eyes
Why they always cry
Sometimes to feel better
Sometimes because feeling better
And tears are not to hold upon
Blink of an eye,
and they are gone.

This isn't just narrative, it's above all primary life that breathes, breathes, breathes.

When patients have lain in bed for weeks or even months and are at last able to get up, they completely overrate their strength. They simply try to do too much, and such foolishness can easily set their recovery back by several weeks; indeed many patients, by engaging in such sudden activity, have managed to bring about the death that they initially evaded through an operation.