Life and Death

A child
Her shrill cry
Her innocent laughter
Her bland interests
And that eternal smile

A teenager,
Her naïve ambition
Her high dreams
Her smoky vision
And that never ending curiosity

A youth,
Her sheer enthusiasm,
That confrontation with the real world,
The world that is half bright and half dark
Half friendly and half hostile
And the glass
That is half empty and half full
The wrangling with obstacles
The collisions that yield little

The middle-aged,
Her half-spoken hobbies
Her half-expressed desires
Her half-met dreams
The ambitions that had merged
The desires that had blended
With something that was once beyond imagination
The endless list of compromises
The open list of omissions,

The old woman,
The revelation in hindsight
The lamentation for lost moments
The mourning for lost companions
The days lost forever
The nights that will come again and again
The frustration at the world
That fails to follow the ‘usual’ dictum
The changes
That come down unanticipated
The agonizing impotency
At inability to restart the life from childhood
Absence of chances to correct the wrongs of the past


Lack of chance to complete the incomplete tasks
And realization of that undesired yet ultimate truth
The perception of being
Incessantly dragged to the door of life’
Death, the ultimate truth.