Of A Lens Lost By a Capital | Sada Mukhtasar

Then I fixed the two rickety legs
(Golden as they were) Of the erstwhile tripod – much as
One would do with wooden pegs –
Into the sterile soil, moist from the night’s dew,
And twirled the dust cap mounted atop the head
Of the sunshade of the telescope.

Ah, stargazing is much a marvel;
To observe and gape jauntily
At the night’s larval
Journey in a plain discourse
To moving days and further moving nights.

Fixing city things in a country fashion,
I patted mounds of moist soil onto the legs
Of the telescope’s broken station
But fixity of two broken legs is harder to achieve
And further harder is the constancy of state
Of a newer set of beliefs.

In its teetering oscillations, the eyepiece sure
Was to fall – I could soon tell by the loosened case
That left the lens insecure.
Then paying courtesy to my sentience,
The lens fell and dropped on the mound – now dried and cracked –
And balanced its equal bulges on its thin periphery
And rolled, like a small penny, on its edges round.

I followed the roll by the curves of the depression
That it followed down the mound
To the foot of a capital of expression –
Carved and sculpted in the newer fashions –
And may’ve hid beneath or above an unkempt cropped foliage
And I couldn’t help but lose it in simple calculations.

Sada Mukhtasar writes for Indian Review.