All this will be

Common as the flu, and as seasonal.

And we will look back with embarrassed attention

At these days and nights of worry

These bated breaths and creased furrows

Wondering who’s next and where.

In time, all this will be distant

As last night’s faded dream.

Our eyes will flicker at the word

Our hearts will miss a beat

When we remember these days,

How an ambulance at the door spelt danger, not hope.

How we looked away from each other

With a measured distance, perfect strangers living together.

In time, we will be more at home

With our many imperfections, our perfect solitude.

We will know how to divide our sorrows, multiply joys,

Like a method actor with many parts, each part a life.

In time, we will learn to eat, a morsel in our palms,

We will learn the meaning of taste.

And what it is to have enough.

We will be sometimes reborn of solitude

That finds us finally whole

After all those years of searching.

In time. All in good time.

The poet will find the words to live

And this will become novel

As a hatchback turtle cab

Crawling the foggy streets of New York, or Kolkata

In the yellow light, hard to tell car from colour.

In time, we will even forget faces

Those in white, warriors wielding scalpels who tunneled through

And we will forget to thank them, we will forget

Their names, what they ate, what it felt to be around them

Their common destinies, their life stories.

Their hopes, their little fears, their moments of joy.

We will look back one day, and wonder

What drove us, fear or hope,

The gulp in our throats or survival written in our code.

The fear in our lips, or the joy of our songs.

What drew us together even as we grew apart.

Our friendship in hardship.

In time, we might remember to call each other home

Like the old days, when growing up meant strangers in our midst.

We may even find the meaning of time

When we go out and meet the sun, at our pace.

When night falls, past midnight, we will haunt that old bar

Where the barman with half a smoke and broken eyes

Plays those blues from the old days

And says he prefers poetry to the sound of silence.

We will remember him, even as he no longer remembers us.

And we will think of hope, its absence of thought, its perfect belief.

When generations on, ask us, what it was like,

We will tell them, yes, we kissed with our eyes,

Learnt how to live, a day at a time, not a breath too soon,

How we never found the time to die.