Like hyphenated words
You and I have never felt disjointed
Although we are remarkably different
You stroll by the sandy beach
And follow the Einesteinian footprints
I sit under the shadow of old Banyan tree
And browse through Tagore’s poems
Yet the insignificant hyphen joins us together.
In a world of fragmentation
Words are divided and sadly separated
Within the bondage of inverted commas
Possessed by unfamiliar people
Who claim they own the words within commas
Even if they are inverted and colons too
Never carry on the meanings across the demarcations
Only you and I are joined by the historic hyphen.
Mathematics has kept us apart
In its crucial calculation of time and space
Which passed in vacuum and in vain
Eventually you did arrive but too late, too little
It was only when the Banyan tree grew old
Grey leaves strayed around in stormy nights
That the tide in your seas touched the shore
And we realized the attachment in hyphen.
Punctuations of time can isolate us in their own ways
But our co-existence will remain afresh over the days
January 10, 2018, Maryland
Copyright@ Anis Ahmed