Outage

When the world got dark, five years ago,
it was not only my world.
An aeroplane got struck by lightning.
My brother died long before his time.
But even before that, a dear friend had failed
In his bid to start a new kind of life.

Then there were betrayals of various kinds
The kind of incidents that make us re-evaluate
What we ever thought was true, or real
And give up automatically believing the best
In human beings exists, beyond what is presented, what seems, what is uppermost.

And in the midst of this grief, like the way earthquake leads to fire, or war leads to famine,
Came the pandemic plague, and all the noise
And worldwide disruption in attendance on it
Like one of those royal progressions in olden days, inexorable, a fait accompli
Except presided over by terrible entities
And far in excess of every other suffering.
We start measuring, and there is no point of comparison.

Now it’s the start of the fifth year of this
And no one cares much, anymore
Except the stubborn and the zealous.
All our emotion has been used up.
Tired of being utilized, we withdraw
Into the plainest circumspection we can manage

Simplicity is an elegance now, as well as a necessity. There is only so much any person can bear.

But there are human inventions, like fire, which alleviate the conditions in which we live.
And putting a string of lights up immediately lightens the heart.
Some flicker, some stay steady, some change colour or intensity, some are waterproof, and operated by batteries.
You do not need an external source of energy
To keep them alight.