Through the periscope of time

Through the periscope of time



Priests and prophets, seers and psychics, astrologers and shamans;

Liars, liars all of them, charlatans.

Parlour tricks, chicanery, smoke and mirrors.

In this tapestry of dust, held together by the stitches of constance

That is immutable, indisputable, invincible, invariable;

Primeval.

In the womb of death, cosy and warm,

The warmth of death that chills the warmth of life,

That swallows in its unfathomable belly, the colours of vivacity;

Bleed into that wet, warm, cosy, cushy, enshrined, venerably lain

For the departed souls to read, if there were souls!

To read as an initiation into the sanctum sanctorum of

Mother Mortality, where all are her equally

Beloved, servient children; restless and eager to please!

Devoted, dying to serve and revel in unending bliss. Ecstatic, rapturous,

To be for good, removed from the execrable living mudball.

Thankful and worshipful, in timeless supplication

And dreading the squalour and perils of lives that they endured.

They are now, inert and sated.

The tapestry that is stitched with the spool of truth reads:

"What is born, must die. Mother death gets what

She wants from her children. Her children must

Return to her. She will reclaim her babies.

She cannot live without them. Her rights

Are supreme and final. No one can foretell her.

No one can tame her. She tames all. She always wins.

And in her hold all shall rest.

She does not discriminate. She does not differentiate.

Her love and want are blind.

We may wander further and further away from her,

For longer and longer.

We can outrun but can't hide and can't win.

We can watch her through the periscope of time

And delight in the demise of our fellow men

As we petty humans are wont to do.

While we are looking through the periscope of time

At the lives of the dead,

Mother death is looking at the lives of the living, in return.

She cares more for her unreturned children,

For the ones she claimed are sleeping blissfully in her cot.

Never to be severed from her again

Nor she from them

After having suckled on the teats of

Mother death. Teats that discharge the

Ethereal milk of a mother that

Lulls and becalms the children to never complain,

To feel no pain. To lay and sleep for all time.

Such is the power of a mother's love.

Her rights, her children's rites. Her love conquers all."


By Kumar Neelotpal