Posting a thrice-published poem here today. i wrote this in my last year of school, and it was first published in a supplement of the Times of India, followed by a leftist newsletter, and then in The Stephanian in my first year of college. It begins with a reference to the colour lilac...if you scroll down to the poem that i've posted just before this one (called Exotic Transition and written in 1990), there is a nice continuity.
Of Revolutions (written on 18th April, 1989).
The lilac mist evaporates
to let the blazing mixture
of the heavens
reign supreme.
And the earth bows down
and is content,
For it approves
of this consistency of events
as they repeat themselves
in systematic succession
with an air
of time-tested perfection.
Then, a strange day arrives
with a different strain
and stranger hues
and shatters all
that once held sway.
The alien storm
uproots the old
and that past perfection
is made to appear
incomplete and erroneous
and is made to fade away
into obsolescence.
And Mankind finds
that the world must change
and that it holds no place
for those who cling on.
And the loss is great.
but what is gained
is greater still.
By V. Shruti Devi (quill-o-the-wisp)
