कैलाश वाजपेयी की कविताएं

Summary

The text presents a fragmented, poetic meditation on despair, existential emptiness, and the nature of meditation. The speaker describes a state of profound suffering, using visceral imagery: a voice that falls like freshly broken wings, swollen breaths that ache, and a soul once as pure as dew now left only as an ugly, bitter shape from years of wakeful exhaustion. The speaker feels godless, like a wall whose foundation was laid but never raised, trapped in a deafening, uncertain present without a future. A figure named Kailash poses a philosophical question about the futility of meditation, arguing that if nothing is achieved through action or inaction—both leading only to ashes—then why meditate at all? The response reframes this, suggesting that actions which occurred before one and will continue after one’s absence cannot truly be one’s own. Similarly, actions one performs unwillingly are also not one’s own. The only true action is the one that arises from not-doing, which cannot be learned through effort. This is what is called meditation. The text concludes by defining meditation as seeing the clarity of the mirror itself, not one’s reflection.