THE SUICIDE OF A STAR

From a luminous shore into an ocean of darkness
leaped a star
like a madman.
They stared at him, the innumerable stars,
astonished
that the speck of light, their erstwhile neighbour, could
vanish in an instant.
He's gone
to the bottom of that ocean
where lie the corpses of
hundreds of dead stars,
whom anguish of mind has driven to suicide
and the eternal extinction of light.
O why? What was the matter with him?
Not once did anyone ask
why he abandoned his life!
But I know what he would have said in reply
had anyone posed the question.
I know what burned him
as long as he was alive.
It was the torment of laughter,
nothing else!
A burning lump of coal, to hide its dark heart,
maintains a continuous laughter.
The more it laughs, the more it burns.
So, even so did laughter's
fierce fire
burn, burn him without end.
That's why today he's run off in sheer despair
from a brilliant solitude full of stars
to the starless solitude of darkness.
Why, stars, why do you
mock him and laugh like that?
You've not been harmed.
You shine as you did before.
He'd never meant
(he wasn't that arrogant)
to darken you by quenching himself.
Drowned! A star has drowned
in the ocean of darkness -
in the deep midnight
in the abysmal sky.
Heart, my heart, do you wish
to sleep beside that dead star
in that ocean of darkness
in this deep midnight
in that abysmal sky?
--Rabindranath Tagore (1882)

I'm back and publishing again. It was only two months that I had stopped publishing. It felt longer.