Grass By Jayanta Mahapatra

Grass By Jayanta Mahapatra

 Grass

Have I to negotiate it?

Moving slowly, sometimes throwing my great grief across its shoulders, sometimes trailing it at my side

I watch a little hymn

 turning the ground beneath my feet, 

a tolerant soil making its own way in the light of the sun

It is just a Mirror marching away solemnly with me, lurching into an ancestral smell of rot, reminding me of secrets of my own: the cracked earth of years, the roots staggering about an impatient sensuality, bland heads heaving in the loneliness of unknown winds.

Now I watch something out of the mind scythe the grass, know that the trees end, sensing the almost childlike submissiveness; my hands that tear their familiar tormentors apart waiting for their curse, the scabs of my dark dread.