That little boy with an arrow,
Sharper than William Tell,
Who takes apples of the ogling eye,
Making them simple stooges.
How arrows find their woundless targets,
The sharp aim, the impeccable accuracy,
The way, a winged child, makes
Adults fall to a monument,
That treasures the present, and even memory,
And is found in places like the Taj Mahal,
Where couples walk on the gardens of Agra,
Looking at a dome, commemorating a queen,
Who was immortalized, and a bench
Where thousands of couple would have sat
Down for a picture, the Taj Mahal in the background
Striving to be a fraction of their love,
They, Shah Jehan and Mumtaz Mahal, possessed.
They see in those ivory-white domes,
The gallantry of a transcendent love,
Whose immeasurable richness surfaces
On the faces of today’s lovers,
Those photogenic moments, when your realize
That love, it is evergreen to some people.
And the Shah, just like you and me,
Kept her memory going forward.
It seems, some people die but never perish.
Like Mumtaz Mahal, a woman,
Who stands tall, in domes of memory,
Surfacing over and over, on photographs.
A reminder how she was loved by one defiant man.
As the dome of a mausoleum, becomes
The ceiling for modern day lovers.
How the greatest loves, are not erosive.
Preserved like a fossil in amber.
And so was Mumtaz Mahal, in marble,
The type that domes far into the skies,
And resident here, is grief as much as love,
On these breast shaped domes,
The birth canal of Shah Jahan’s grief,
And the muse of Tagore,
Marble domes so fitting of love,
That beautiful perennial.
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Kite Dreams 