Love Poem: The Covered Bridge
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Written by: Probir Gupta

The Covered Bridge

The covered bridge
The lover’s refuge

When in a huge crisis
The knife cuts into slices
The birds inside the ribs

When in a deluge
All the resource to be used 
has been exhausted

Have you seen
Those birds in the cage
How sensuously
They pretend to move out 
Only to return in glee
To make poetry of our machine
The queens of moment fleet away
Leaving just clay
In the bay of our thoughts
Knots of tendrils 
Dots of brown and ash spots
Blots from plots in life
Covering the ridge
Once a rainbow
Of violet arrows

And the deluge?
When time devastates us
As it did recently
In Las Ramblas
What do we have to fall back on
When all hopes seem gone
We are cut away from our luncheon
Nowadays very off and on

Where do we flee
From the gory plight
The destiny of fright and flight

The only panacea
In such wounds of amnesia
Is that covered bridge
Still holding in its tendrilled blisses
Your kisses

The bridge between
What was
And what has been
Retrospectively seen
Covered with shrubbery
Our poetry
We shared
Our combined moments
We so much cared

As we look backward
And inward
Back are all the birds
Some intimately known
Some yet unknown
Can I ever know you completely
Only a dance or two
As your birds flew
In a splash of hue
We know lyrically

We wait
We contemplate
What a lovely bridge
Covered with tendrils of creepers
In dark and sunshine those toxic whispers
Mostly embroidered with smile but tears as well
Only those who have had the covered bridge can tell
How it can give you heavenly feel even amidst the pell-mell



August 25, 2017