Roland E.T Mhasvi The Flowers of Yesterday. An Anthology of Poems

THE POND

The basined pond rippled clear with water
Fresh from the drenching early morning rain:
Light played so softly through the sparkling waves
And, as i looked, came into view the isle
Palms waving in the golden flush of sun!
Then came the frowning sludge with my first plunge,
The flotsam and jetsam of my soiled life
Pounding my shores in wrinkled dandruff waves,
Burying with carrioned scurf my Elixir
As my life pond eyed me with sicklied age.

When the eye of age had finally closed,
And the waves had frozen stiff in the pond,
And the mirror stood watch against the wall,
whilst the sun learned West, casting feebled rays
That fell down in wrinkled waves of yellow,
I creaked upwards slowly to half-upright.
Stared silent at the mirrored waterway
That now rippled down the tp of my head,
Drowning in rising tides of age the land
Where before the bloom of my youth had sprung!

As i stared in the mirror that evening
At the slow receding shores of my life,
I glimpsed receding shores of my life,
That drowned slowly in the rising past.
Now the last frond sank down the grim edge
And dissolved into the thick’ning darkness
That clamped my knees in rising waves of chill
In the murky world of Anaesthesia.
Wrecked in my rake-routed body, i croaked-
“Land Ahoy!” in the doom-cracked voice of Age.