THE UNCONQUERABLE
BY BALDOON DHINGRA
What is
it that thrills and, troubles, wakens and benumbs?
Why are
hopes unfurled again with every Spring that comes?
Why do
marching pulses beat the heart’s defiant drums?
Unfulfilment
cannot cloud the spirits that aspire,
Cannot
quench the radiance of vitality, whose fire
On a sea
of hope throws the search-light of desire–
Enervating
argument and proverb pessimist
Cannot
close the motion of an infinite pursuit,
Cannot
hush life’s clarion or make the bugles mute.
Batteries
of hope are silenced; chafing ardours halt;
Dreams in
broken regiments are driven from the field.
Squadrons
of belief disordered turn from the assault,
One thin
line of thought alone can stand and never yield.
Thought,
pervading chaos, is the constant that survives:
Thought,
the core of being, the main current of the whole;
Impulse,
partly manifest in clumsy human lives,
Witness
to the challenge of a purpose and a goal.
We who
plunge and blunder in the dark morass of tears,
Are but
foam ephemeral on pools of consciousness.
Action–matter–all
the changing pageant that appears
Hints at
the revelation we are diligent to guess;
Knowing
how the greater may be hidden by the less.
Bubbles
on the surface are the things that man has made,
And puffs
of air the deeds that he has done;
Death is
but the flickering dominion of a shade
And life
a waning moment in the sun.
Accident
or chance can only mar
Our
Life’s outer garment. We are hedged in what we do,
But
nought can set the bounds to what we
are.