In nightly hours the towers shine,
And poetry flows from Baudelaire’s eyes,
Eyes that have seen the truth,
And speak them if you may, my love,
For all truth is but love, he said,

The sweet hour is what humbles us,
For humility is the truth,
As the poet died, with crooked lips,
His eyes still saw the truth, he said,

Come what may! When I’m gone,
I will still have a life to live,
For I am Baudelaire! Son of a song
That the Cipher sings on his way!

Tell us the truth then, what mortal song
Does the heart sing on its way?
Asked the public placing flowers on his bed,
A secret, then, that the young must know,
When the old pass through,

The old masters knew it, then it came into misuse,
And the revolution sees it sung again,
He’s here, the Cipher is –
His song is sung everywhere too,

Looking back, I believe, the masters knew,
The world is immortal, but built in stone,
Much like a song, and so they found,
In the magician’s mortal sounds
A piece of the world: a magic wand,
A craze, a fit, an hourglass,
A respectable land with nothing cursed,
A poet’s sweet voice through the hills,
A lover’s moan through the street,

With so much evil are we blessed
That suffering angels among us dwell?
I asked and asked but nothing found,
The Cipher’s music makes its round
In coughs and barking dogs and machine sounds,
In dying men, in worlds of mortality new found,

Does eternity then call us home?
Does Man laugh when he calls us home?
He’s had his share of suffering,
Let him be, he lives somewhere else.

…

Ritwik is a writer and actor. He is planning on studying as well. He tries to live and write what he believes in.