कुंवरनारायण की कविताएं

Summary

The text presents a philosophical meditation on existence, time, and the human condition. It opens with a sense of grief over an absence and a feeling of being alive within that void. The speaker questions their place between an unmotivated beginning and an unmotivated death, reflecting on a transformation from softness, like a flower, to hardness, like a stone of memory. Inertia is described as imminent. The speaker observes how the present sometimes pauses between many pasts and futures, as if awake only in memories, fleeing from a birthright of living. This is portrayed as a painful torment—a living moment stuck in place, unpassed, unoccurred, speechless—while new desolations cry out voicelessly. The plea is for something to pass, whether life or death, with clarity, cutting through uncertainty. The text then shifts to a sense of recurrence, as if the speaker has been in these places before, passed through, and waited in shadows, filling and emptying empty spaces repeatedly, repenting. It contemplates the riddle of "nothingness," suggesting that like this day, people will flare up and silently extinguish, holding onto the world's edge, as light gradually darkens. Like pages of an illiterate book, they will be torn, lost in flowing winds, becoming ash. The speaker wonders if opening the sealed riddle of nothingness would yield anything more than a handful of dust. For now, there is the temptation to solve it and the plan to wrestle with emptiness, questioning if life will ever offer something greater than life itself.