Prayer Flags

 

Were we the last that day to start

From high on Yumthang vale?

Snowstorm - the cars turned back

For the skies were grey and pale

 

Coming down to Lachen’s warmth

You stopped our car enroute,

As I look back now, I only smile

How little I understood

 

In a summer sleet, you had to stop

Why, I didn’t know,

Not for the hills, nor mountain blooms

Not for the coming snow

 

In the freezing cold, I walked to you

What is it you seek?

‘Prayer Flags’ was all you said

While the skies turned grey and bleak

 

Down below, the hills were blue

The meadows emerald green,

But prayer flags standing in a line

Were all that you had seen

 

Despite the cold and melting rains,

Their silky flutter in white

Were singing with the whistle of winds

They shone with a different light

 

‘Can you hear them sing, their carefree swish?’

Your eyes had a certain glow

‘They are on song no matter where

These empty winds may blow.’

 

And there you stood for minutes long

(While I longed for a cup of tea)

You were lost in the lane of the prayer flags

That sang for eternity

 

The rains came down, the snow, the sleet

You stood on time, its crags

While all along, the cosmos sang

In the song of the prayer flags

 

At last, you smiled and I realised -

In the fabric of time, a crack

It was not the present, not at all

But us in the future, looking back

 

To a moment’s trap in the hills of high,

The prayers in your eyes aglow,

Singing, dancing, fluttering all

However the winds may blow…

 

9^th May, 2025

(Cover image - Yumthang Valley, North Sikkim, Author's archives)