Irreversible Water

Who are the masters and who are the pupils?
Who are these people who speak a privileged language?
Alpha and omega,cosmic constant, universal love,
ligase and gyrase, centromeres and telomeres.
This place, a place to seek the light of knowledge,
Some strange light of some strange knowledge!
Telomeres – the tail ends of a chromosome is not the center of life!
Life, life, there is such a thing called life outside all imaginable paradigms.
Is life more or less than life if such and such constants were
to be so and so variables? True or false, tell me, tell me in one word?

Once I came across a man, he was happy,
happy like a ghost visible in the broad daylight.
Without a care, he walked,
he walked in the middle of the road
teeming with automobiles of late afternoon traffic.
And he walked as if he was walking on the water.
Indeed, he walked barely touching the ground!
He was in truth a happy man who seemed to have
firmly grasped life by its slippery horns.
I raised my hands to him and asked if he would
let me write his life-history. He replied, “From the time
when water became wine which turned into blood,
Life has never been the same again. Bring me a glass of water
and I will tell you instead the long and short of your own
biography in a burgundy-colored drop of wine.
While searching for the meaning of life you have lost happiness.
While searching for happiness you have found a life fragmented by discontent.
You brought fire from heaven and fuel from the bowel of the earth.
Out of these elements, by a strange alchemy, you attempted
to create an endless happiness and immortality.
Man,you may devise your own immortality
but can you save yourself from your extravagant ingenuity?"
I say no, because we have begun to breathe,
begun to breathe our own stale and acrid breath.
All to you, O endless happiness and immortality!
But some must still die so that others may live,
it has always been so and it must continue to be so, for our own good.
If all must live forever then it would not be long before we are forced
to drink brine of our own body. What price! Indeed it is a heavy price
to pay for a bagful of gloom of our own creation.
Such immortality with promise of so meager a return, I do not want it.
Such tormented immortality – a deferred dead amidst misery, I do not want it.
I do not want it, for life becomes but once, without turning back.

The present must cease to be so that future can become.
The old must make way for the young and the river must flow, for water is irreversible.
The old must not suck life out of marrow intended for the young.
for then there may come a day when nothing is ever enough.
(Those with myriads needs must not desire immortality.)
They may cover their ears, but they will still hear
the unmuffled voices of children crying out for justice.
They may dig their hands deep into their breasts and
history will not absolve them,
they may plait their hands into a bouquet of roses
but the future will not condone them,
even though there is such a thing called
life outside the established paradigms.
The truth is this: the earth rests,
trembling, on fragile wings of a butterfly.
Let us return it to its primitive purity,
before it is too late,
though the water is still and irreversible.