THE STARE

Everyone left the burial ground.
Its been four hours now
And I look intently at the remnants of a few glowing cinders.
A wave of winter-cold creeps into my bones.
The day slowly resigns into the late hours of the evening.
I’ve been sitting in the car for a long time,
My melancholy weaves into the engulfing darkness.
At sporadic intervals, tears would flow freely down my cheeks
And without a conscious effort they would stop suddenly
Caught in a strange confusion between dream and reality.

The air inside the car is infested with a swarm of mosquitoes
Murmuring the tales of the dead into my ears;
By now my eyes got accustomed to the darkness.
At a distance, a few feet away from the car,
I see two tiny playful animals nibbling at the bark of a tree.
They hurry up and down the tree, chasing each other,
And for the next few minutes, I was completely lost in their busy, sneaky bustle.
Breaking into the eerie silence a pair of violent gigantic wings
Swoop down from nowhere and the vicious claws dig into one of the squirrels,
And grab it with the ferocity of an overwhelming predatory instinct.
I look around for the other rodent.
It already escaped somewhere deep into the wilderness.
Carried by the occasional breeze, I can hear echoes of a frightened, panicking life;
A life still breathing. 

Perched on a mounted rock,
The bird pecks into the warm flesh with greedy strokes
And within a few minutes the prize is completely devoured.
After the meal it stares into a void. Or directly at me.
I stare back at the large disturbing eyes of the owl.
The eyes reek of a cold emptiness: a void as certain as death.

As I drive back home that night,
I silently savor the memories of a strong friendship that dates back to my college days.