~Curtain~

Goodbye.

Incredulously the laced fingers loosen,

Slowly sensation by sensation, from their warm interchange,

And stiffen like frosted flowers in the November garden.

Already division piles emphasis like bullets;

Already the one dark air is separate and strange.



Goodbye.

There is no touch now.

The wave has broken

That for a moment charged the desolate sea.

There is a word or two left to be spoken--yet who would hear it?

When so swiftly distance

Out measures time, engulfs identity?

Already like the dreamer startled from sleep

And the vivid image lost even in the waking,

There is no taste now for the shrunken sense to keep,

And these, the dreamer’s eyes, are not alive to weep,

And this, the clinic heart, the dreamer’s is not breaking.

Is it so easy then? Goodbye no more then this

Quiet disaster? And is there a cause for sorrow

That in this small white murder of one kiss

Are born two ghosts, two Hamlets, two soliloquies

Two worlds apart, tomorrow?

---helen spalding



As much as I detested the 12th grade cbse syllabus for english (after icse!:P),this was one poem which i really liked.The time this poem was written,the place..everything was so apt.even when it talks about seperation..of two souls..it does not necessarily mean between two lovers..the idea of seperation could be between a father and daughter,two siblings...

My favourite part of the poem are the last two verses,since it reveals so much about how two people can be individuals and yet be dependent on each other...It talks about the uncertainty..incase of hamlet"to be or not to be",a famous quote.