Poetry 2017 Featured Neelam Saxena Chandra

WITHERING

I gazed vacuously for long
At the pale yellow stems of the rose shrub
That was but sand now…
Every passing moment,
A bit of its trace shall vanish,
Till its form is scrapped off completely…
I don’t suppose it died all of a sudden,
It hadn’t flowered at all that year,
And the season before that,
It had merely bloomed…
When I had seen it last frosty winter,
I suppose it had made up its mind
That it no longer wished to stay back...
Death never comes
All of a sudden,
A bit of the self perishes
Little by little
Before the ultimate demise!