Basudeb visits love and its long legacy, searching for truth, in this evocative poem, exclusively for Different Truths.

I tell my ecstasy to appear,
With her joyous splendour,
In front of my physical eye.
When she comes to my vision,
I then find all her ugly.
My eyelids stop me to look at her.
I become temporarily blind,
And I dive deep into my inner mind,
For enjoying how I beautify her with my disdain,
I illumine her face with two dimples in her cheek.

Who creates who?
Do I, or does she?
The colour of my look, or she, the object?
But her beauty in colourful collage
In my mind, maybe, it is not her make,
It is I, not She, who create her a beauty,
Is it my mind, not the real She seems to qualify.
She is both real and unreal,
So the dialectical,
So the life seems to be charmingly palpable.

Is love then divine?
Is love a long ravine?
Is love happy?
Is Faustus’s love for Helen foxy?
Is Shakespeare’s love the Dark Lady rocky?
Is Keats’s love for Fanny insatiability?
Is Petrarch’s love for Laura eternal?
Is Browning’s love for Elizabeth transcendental?
Is Hardy’s love for Florence eternal?
Is Jibanananda’s love for Bonolata Sen fanciful?

Who is Human Being’s great grant,
Marx or Immanuel Kant or our canonical Cant?
Love is an imaginary angel,
Love is a nostalgic damsel.

©Basudeb Chakraborti

 Photo from the Internet