Oedipus

12x16 inches; Watercolor, Pen and ink on acid free textured paper (Click on image to enlarge)

Tragedy

Have you lost hope along with your eyes?

When you dug them out with your bare hands

Like cadavers from the depth of their graves

Rendering yourself blind, did you also dig up the guilt?

Had your eyes witnessed too much?

Had they...had you sinned?

Was it all your doing or was destiny your foe?

Or was it your father who set the ball rolling?

Were you not born to kill your own father and be the king?

The father, who driven by fear for his own life,

Had wanted to end yours by snatching you away

From your mother’s suckling breasts and tossing you out,

Out into the wilderness...

Years later, you killed him as a stranger

At the crossroads of your destiny and his.

Was it not poetic justice? Was it not sweet revenge?

Did he not want to cheat you of your destiny?

Did he not think he had erased the cause

And so, the effect?

Do you wish now that your father had not failed,

So long ago, to kill you as a babe?

Should we not compare moral codes and measure

How heavily it inspires guilt to torment our souls?

Take your mother for example.

Society would have her strangle you with your umbilical cord

Knowing that you will grow up to kill her husband

And sleep with her as a lover.

She did not. She could not!

Was that her sin? Did her love for you as a mother,

Stop the milk in her breasts from turning to poison?

Did she love your father any less?

Or did she just resign to her fate?

She did not know you when you came to marry her.

Was that her blame, the inability to identify her son?

Your father did not know the same.

Did she love you any less as her husband?

Why could you not recall her to be your mother?

Did you not know the smell of her breasts

While you kissed them? Could you not sense ‘déjà vu’?

Could you not remember being inside her once

When you were inside her again?

When you saw her hanging in death, did you call out to her?

‘My queen, dear wife, my love, darling... mom...mother...’

What appellation did you find proper to call her by?

For whom do you mourn the most – a mother, a wife or both?

Or do you mourn only for your own tragic life?

Don’t you wish now that the cunning Sphinx

Had riddled you with this instead – ‘Tell me gallant youth,

How does a son love his mother after he has taken her as his wife?’

You would not have known the answer clever one,

And she would have made a meal of you then.

But that was not to be your fate!

Is there any tragedy without the fall of the great?

- Rudra Kishore Mandal