Foundry

Mocking, they said, for the both of us it wouldn’t work out,
That, all it would take is a match stick, for both of us to burn out,
And for a while it seemed we both too, were in doubt,
How true it all was, we would very soon find out.

That is how we came to realize that something was badly broken,
And we had to fix it, if only to continue remaining bespoken,
We knew there was more than familiarity to revoke,
If those old feelings for each other we had to evoke.

Unconsciously each of us had built an invisible wall,
A wall that doggedly separates us footfall by footfall,
Alas, it’s a wall we love, wall we hate, wall we cannot mention,
Built by the bricks of our values, our beliefs,  our every emotion.

We need to work on this brick by brick, level by level,
Till we reach the very foundations of this upheaval,
When all that is left, is the mangled bars of foundation,
We reach the point that is beyond mere decimation.

That’s when we need to bend my ego with your humility,
To break your aggression upon my timidity,
To stamp my fear over with you courage,
To clear our ignorance with this knowledge.

To relent your obstinacy along with my stubbornness,
To cherish your sorrow along with my happiness,
To quench my greed through your contentment,
To shelter our union from every disappointment.

Only then can we mix every tear with a smile,
So that you and me can take us forward another mile,
For, only when each of us gives up control over what we hold,
Can we truly together possess everything we behold.

This one is for the Gazebo although it is inspired by head-over-heels impression of the movie Ye Maya Chesave. To put the point across in simple terms, love takes a lot of work. To build a monument called love, egos need to be crushed, boundaries need to be laid, bonds need to be cemented, beliefs need to be sculpted, trust needs to be concretized, emotions need to be polished, etc. It is much akin to making a diamond ring (the reason why the poem is titled Foundry).

To make a diamond ring, you need to cleanse the ore to get the gold, and that means burning it with a lot of acids. You need to melt the gold, pour it into a mould and wait for it to set. You need to clean the rough, choose a cut, and optimize the size. You also need to then set the stone in the gold. If any one of these stages was dispensed with, you might end up with either a rough stone on glittering gold, or a scintillating gem on a piece of ore. There is no middle ground, each of these has to let go of the things define them to become a thing that together defines them. The movie very beautifully captures the pain points that prevent each of them from reaching out to the other. We all need to go through that furnace together and burn our differences, melt our apprehensions, and mould our desires before we can truly become one. Each of us call its by a different name, but in the end, its all the same, unless each of us lets go, we can’t make it together.