DEATH OF RADHA

He told;
Now that my greater responsibilities beckon me,
I must go, Radha,
Away from you and from my life hitherto,
Because I have to look after others too,
There is a world beyond this world of the banks of Yamuna
And there is a love greater than ours,
Radha listened quietly,
Yamuna entered her that day,
that moment,
And never ceased to flow,
It drained her of any joy she had ever known,
And any love she had ever received on her soul,
on her body,
The grief ate into her being
And she searched solace
in the groves, by the riverside,
in the places of her escapades,
in the bowers that were witness to her ecstasies of love,
stared into the night sky with tearful questions,
which answered back with silence,
Days kept changing into nights
And nights changed into moments of lingering, impending death,
She bore it upon her soul,
Her love,
Like gold, and sought relief in no one but her aloneness,
And carried the terrible disquiet
Through the monotonous milkmaid’s existence,
And the sufferance that her being had enveloped itself in,
Lived without a life,
Loved without a lover,
Burned her soul in ever-smouldering fire
That waited for the elusive,
Joy and pain became one inside her one day
and she became Goddess.

Nobody knows when Radha died or if she did,
Krisna went and fought,
Visible and invisible battles
destiny had woven in his name,
Played games that never needed to be played,
Wrote many stories for posterity,
And died,
he did.
He died much later,
Radha had died the day he left her alone,
By the side of a river
Below the Kadamba tree,
She had died
the moment her eyes had turned vacant,
And her heart had dried up in her breast.