When Someone Dies Poem by Prabir Gayen

When Someone Dies
(Someone Very close and distant)
(Elegy for Anirban Mondal)
By Prabir Kumar Gayen

When someone dies, I place the blame on me,
I feel a void where once a cosmos stirred,
As if an ocean lost a breath of wave,
As if the sacred ornaments I bore
Were torn from me by hands I cannot see.
I stand, a hill abandoned by the wind,
Unvisited, unloved by foot or gaze.
When someone dies, I taste a guilt unnamed.

The rain descends without an evening bell,
Yet tell me—does it fall for naught at all?
A flood arrives and strips the lawn of life,
Engulfing peace in sorrow's swollen tide.
And sunlight comes, pretending all is well,
It walks like innocence across the wreck.
But I remain in shadow, wingless, mute,
Betrayed by silence—I was not asked why
The leaving came like night, unbidden, stark.

I am the one who failed to show the soul,
The touch, the voice, the heart in overflow,
The one who loved but held the words too long.
I am the one deserted by the breeze,
By reason, by the stars that used to sing.
When someone dies, a part of me departs,
Their silence becomes pain I cannot name,
Their silence folds me into death again.

I wander through the land where whispers bloom,
Where no one walks but one unseen by name,
Behind the curtain of this fragile world.
I walk, and in the walking seek His feet.
Yet sometimes, even shadows leave my side,
And fade like mist into the grave's wide mouth.
I feel the pyre inside begin to burn,
And with that flame, I vanish into ash.

Each death becomes a sword within my chest,
And dying, I reclaim what joy denied.
I dwell in dark and sip its silent music.
Through darkness I hear voices without faces.
The ones whose bones now murmur in my sleep,
Their village rises dreamless in my dream,
The fields, the homes, the faces lost to time
Retreat in silence through my wakeful soul.

I thought, perhaps, I could have been their guard,
Perhaps I could have stopped the clock of death
Yet every death begets a deeper hole,
And I remain, the echo of the lost.
I died with Rabindranath and his lute,
I died with Socrates beneath his cup,
With Ashoka's gaze and Vikram's throne.
I died with Vivekananda's burning will,
And in each dying, swore I'd stand and shield.

But death, relentless, walks with naked feet,
Its touch turns every heartbeat into prayer.
Each soul it claims becomes a hidden bloom
That blossoms in the garden of my pain.
I am the door where none has come to knock,
And death has entered without call or name.

I feel a world that begs to end in me,
Its restless grief, its rivers made of fire.
And in that blaze, I wish I could have loved,
More deeply, more, till death itself would pale.
This is the world of death with birth entwined,
Where every cry contains the note of ash.
Death plays the role of life in mask and veil,
And what we call a blessing is its song.

Yet still the heart, that stubborn rebel, dreams,
It dreams of moonlit ponds and swans of stars,
Of galaxies that float in breathless calm,
Of full-moon nights and dawns of liquid gold.
Of birds that sing of joy that fades in mist,
Of waves that speak of loss and find their rest.

Without the death, the life is but a curse;
With death, the blessing of a soul takes form.
Yet every death reminds me of my own,
I perish with the trees, the beasts, the breeze,
Yet linger like a fading note, unknown.
@Prabir Gayen
11/06/25/10: 30 PM.