Two Poems

I.
Autumn leaves are seasoned
Into myriad memory metaphors.
When the seasons are done
Some grey out or slowly turn 
Into intense colours and burn
Glittering bright on stark boughs.
Like forgetting is the mind's winter
When thoughts begin hibernation
Autumn leaves come off and fall
All over the mind's darkest floor.
When you take a memory walk
Down this dank autumn forest
The brighter leaves claim the eye
And the rest are remaindered.

II.
A white moth came to my room
With a freight of superstition 
On its still dull white buttery wings. 
It sat equilaterally 
Like a perfect triangle 
sharp-ended  
With a lethal intent.
Its beady eyes fixed 
The silence with authority 
And imposed in the room 
An unearthly solemnity.
Coming from the guts of darkness
It asserted all the more its eeriness,
Superstition's primal pigments.
My study turned into an ideal setting
For communion with unknown beings
Or some truth that never goes
Beyond an unverifiable hypothesis.
I sensed an abiding equation
Between death and learning:
Knowledge never quite enlightens us;
It's a path from light to darkness.

Masud Mahmood is a Professor of English at Chittagong University.