Moon at Half Past Noon

The canvas, primed, refused the blinding white,
accepting instead a veil of ashen grey.
A ground of silence, to receive the light
of Chandrashni at the break of day.
A solemn promise, made in undertone,
to let the mountain’s true, cold heart be known.

The charcoal, sharp, obeyed a steady hand,
and traced the ridgeline, sure and clean and deep.
The deodar, a steadfast, waiting stand,
a secret that the waking light would keep.
Each mark a contract, confident and sworn,
to hold the form of what the eye had borne.

His brush, a whisper, lifted from the cup
a film of medium and cobalt, pure and thin.
To build the sky, and slowly, lift it up,
and let the morning’s clarity begin.
This patient art of seeing through the hue,
was why he’d come, to make the world anew.

A siren’s wail, both metallic and sweet—
his thumb smudged cloud-shapes into soulless haze.
The peak’s sharp edge, now softened, almost faint,
as scumbled white obscured the cobalt’s blaze.
The memory of smog, a phantom breath,
began to paint the landscape with its death.

Then from the knife, a thick and sudden paste,
a yellow ochre, sour as a lime,
coagulated, with a city’s haste,
to mock the patient, measured reach of time.
A traffic jam in peaks of crusted clay,
where tranquil, glazed horizons meant to stay.

The sun, which carved the valley’s dark and light,
which gave the stone its volume and its soul,
was flattened by a glow, unnervingly bright,
that swallowed ridge and vale, the depth and whole.
The city’s single, unrelenting tone
erased the shadow, took the substance from the bone.

And now the truth beneath began to bleed—
a charcoal ridge, a line he could not kill,
a spectral deodar, a stubborn seed,
that haunted his command, and challenged skill.
The mountain, like a conscience, scratched its way
back through the urban smear of his dismay.

He took the knife again, not to apply,
but to erase, to gouge, to make a scar.
He scraped the city’s falsehoods to the sky,
but only found its foundations went too far.
Each desperate scrape revealed a deeper stain,
a web of wires, a more entrenched pain.

He steps back now. The canvas holds a schism,
a palimpsest of failure, layer-caked.
A battlefield of pigment, scraped and soiled,
where every hope is lost, every line faked.
The easel stands, a stark and silent frame,
holding a signature that faded as it came.
And the initial grey, the imprimatura,
is all that’s left—a field without a feature.