The eye of the poet is a mystic ocean. The silence and the ferocity of waves are equally responsible for contributing to his composition. A deeper silence, embedded by displeasure, can at any time raise the tempest. The turmoil embraced by the waves can only be silenced by the calm mind of the poet, which settles the wailing of the waves. Between the composed waves and the hidden turmoil of the ocean, there lies a poet’s abode, a mysterious world where the bard is guided by his imagination and soars into the vastness of wisdom on the wings of his gifted toolbox. The portentous insight of the poet always puts forth his mental image on the softest skin of society. His interpretations and connotations, though they seem like an ordinary worksheet prepared well by the aid of skill, yet his vision that manufactures the final picture keeps the reader at a distance. In between the lines, the space belongs to the poet alone, and, of course, to a genuine reader who makes his way through the tunnel leading to reach his state of creation. In Dr Nazir Azad’s poem Son’s Fleeting Glimpse, something serious can peep through the mind as the grief of a mother has taken a shape of everlasting pain. It is a mother’s under breast itch.  It is equally a temptation narrating how low hanging fruit becomes the victim of breeze. This poem is yet another testimony of our common narrative. The entire poem is just a slice of our past disclosing the lingering pain that we only transfer from heart to heart either through the wails or verses. The poet has portrayed an unknown force as fairy song luring the wishful heart. The progressive metaphors, mystical imagery and the ail of a mother have given this poem an archetypal impact , on one hand , yet on the other,  maintained  literary tradition of unadorned elegy, molested memories and irreparable destiny. The poem is an interplay between the mother’s suffering and metaphoric, multifaceted doctrines of wailing. It also narrates a universal understanding of loss and tattered memories as a takeaway of the separation. The central emotion of the poem is under the reign of the mother, a symbolic architecture that has established a link between the reader and the state of mind of the poet. Unlike other grief-stricken mothers of the conflict zone, her character stands unique for a few reasons. One is that the poet has not overloaded her agony with heavy sighs and a hyperbolic pall on her face. She is a physical manifestation of grief, as her wrinkles are chronicles that reveal hitherto unheard sagas of sorrow. Her wrinkles are natural repositories of waiting and endurance. As the poem develops, her transformation into a living archive becomes so intense that her son’s absence seems like a permanent birthmark of motherhood, lived in a zone that is highly vulnerable to wreckage. One powerful expression of the poem is that, trapped within the wrinkles of that mother, is a narrative which we bear under our unvoiced breasts. These wrinkles are as clear as her agony. The son is not laid to rest under the thick cover of merciless soil but preserved in the wrinkles; thus, he is entombed within her wrinkles. These wrinkles intensify the woes of the mother, suggesting that motherly love can never be overpowered by time and space. She has been presented by the poet as both the guardian and the prisoner of memories. The poem takes a mythic turn when the image of the Mountain of the Voice resonates through the vacuum of our collective consciousness. This builds an ending bridge between the expectation of a mournful mother and destiny, an inevitable tussle between motherly love and fate, which knows how to erase the script from the wrinkled volumes of a mother’s love. The songs of fairies further deepen this effect; these songs may, in a cordial atmosphere, attract attention, but in surreal surroundings the melody lacks the mirth to match human suffering. The way the poet has deliberately avoided confirming the loss of her son, the ambiguity of such a nature, only heightens the drama, keeps a pulsating heart lingering, and underscores the cruelty of separation. Similarly, the recurrent images of green letters elevate the theme of the poem to another level of understanding, which requires a bleeding heart rather than a refined intellect. The poem is yet another proof of emotional honesty. It is not a piece of sermon that, at the top of its voice, wants to grab the attention of the listeners, but it acknowledges the complexity of loss, where hope and despair coexist as an agreement of survival. The poem intersects time, memory, and love with its highly polished imagery that oscillates between corporeal reality and metaphysical reflection. This unique treatment by Dr. Nazir Azad makes this poem yet another piece of conflict literature in which emotions resonate more than intellectual mourning. “Son’s Fleeting Glimpse” is a reversal of famous classical myth employed by Milton. When Orpheus loses Eurydice, but returns, but Dr Nazir has used a powerful reversal the son “moved forward / and never looked back,” which has not only challenged the Greek myth but has represented as a voice of a common mother who has not seen her son’s return. Thus Dr Nazir Azad has proved his potential as a poet of people to le the things follow as they move naturally. Son’s Fleeting Glimpse I am enshrined in the depths of your eyes, like that same lost moment which, on the bay of time, slipped away and never returned, trapped within the wrinkles of that mother, whose beloved son, standing on Mountain of the Voice after listening to the songs of the fairies, moved forward and never looked back into the profound folds and among the frozen wrinkles of the mother. I am but a single, precise moment in the vast, wide-open hem of time, turning that green letter again and again, the one that instantly occupied heart, mind, and soul, that, in books, copies, pen, and inkpot, both ignored and inspired that vivid green hue. But in that unknown island of time, she took refuge, entangled in the mesh of wrinkles and the grey-skinned mother’s body, turned ashen by the ceaseless rubbing of soil. Her son, glimpsed among the summer greenery, inspired by the enchanting songs of the fairies, moved forward and never returned. I need time to find myself, to carve a pathway through your dreams, like a mother enmeshed in her wrinkles. And in no time, upon the lawn, may bloom the flower of a son’s fleeting glimpse on the unknown island of time.   (The Author is a distinguished Kashmiri novelist, poet, translator, columnist, reviewer and TV anchor with over two decades of contributions to literature and education and guiding aspiring writers through creative writing workshops and pedagogy training)