To see Kanchenjunga again

Ten years, it took me

To visit the white mountains again,

A decade of brooding memories

In exiled sun and rain

 

I wondered then, this time,

What would be Kanchenjunga’s last view

That last image I would carry

Until this journey would renew

 

Every dawn in Darjeeling, I’d ask

If this morning's is the last,

If this is the view I’d come back to,

When I would think about the past

 

But Kanchenjunga was too kind –

He showed Himself each day,

Reminding, in thousand hues of sunrise red,

Of the ten years I had to pray

 

But He stopped not at the hilly heights,

I saw Him in Mirik again,

And even towards the journey end,

In the hot and dusty plain

 

The train chugged off from the foothills

He was still there in the frame,

The horizon ‘blazoned all in white

For the pilgrims all who came

 

But as that vision blurred, I heard

A voice from that snowy bluff,

Will a million times work at all,

If once in not enough?

 

Will you pine for a decade again

If trapped in exile far,

Or will you smile on a cloudy night

Without a shimmering star?

 

The train moves fast, there are no more hills,

But there’s more that I can see,

Man and Mountain, far removed,

Yet as close as they can be

 

Far away here, I see a wall of clouds

Shimmer in bluest skies

I see Kanchenjunga yet again,

Ensconced in these eyes…

 

19^th Feb’2023