Signature

A dateline leaps off the flyleaf, yellowed
with age: Calcutta, ’74. Above it, like barbed wire
in faded royal blue, youth proclaims
its arrogance in points of fire.
Bend your mind, and they could be flames
licking the sky, pride unmellowed.

But that’s a skyline thirty years old,
before Time worked on those ungainly spikes
with such tools as only he knows:
files for the pliant, rasps for the likes
of the obdurate and bellicose
before their stubborn ires went cold.

Look at it now, and you’ll see little
of that awkward landscape. The horizon’s free
of gawky pines, marked now by a few
troughs and slopes; vestigial anarchy
from some past ferment, beyond one’s view.
And soon, very soon, this too must settle.

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