what does this mean? please help!!?

Question

i need to kno what this poem means.

A gray haze over the rice fields.
The black cow grazing with her newborn calf—
long-legged, unsteady—
or trucks going past the high road:
such things only claim
that I am looking out in search of memory,
not death. Those little kisses on my cheeks
my long-dead grandmother gave me, or
the soft dampness of my tears when
my mother didn't notice me
from beyond the closed door of her youth.

Today the dangling thread stops halfway down,
where my hands cannot touch it.
It's not that I wait for judgment.
But at times I see a shadow
move slowly over these, a shadow freed
from the past and from the future,
that contains the footsteps of that childhood
so light I can only think of squirrels
slipping in and out of the mango trees.

Answer 1

-----Read the poem over and over again until it does mean something to you. On two readings, it seems to me the writer of the poem is near death and is looking back over her life; it seems to me a woman wrote the poem. After ten readings, I may have a different "take" on it. ---Jim

Answer 2

The author is Jayanta Mahapatra. A lot of his poetry is about memories from his childhood in India.

Read it again with that in mind and you should be better able to interpret what he was seeing in his mind.

Answer 3

It appears to be a poem written by a dying man, and his
his thoughts as he lay dying.