Twilight Existences

Can you uproot the uprooted?







Strong limbs, submissive lives, 
Bruised palms, egos , souls untroubled 
Abstracted friends, love forlorn, 
Ghost families
Burnt faces, tireless dreams.

Undeserved, 
even of punctuations?
In the ditties of growth
Where did paan, bidi, or gutkha
pitch-in to  make-over, build, develop?

Unacknowledged martyrs, uncelebrated piety
Killed, burnt, maimed
Uprooting the uprooted
fulfilling convenient whims,
Of unbeknownst nations, obtuse destinies.

Wiped from imaginations
Subtracted from reality.
Quietly born and raised
To mop, pull, push, drag
civilizations' humdrum burdens 

Underneath the ordinary where,
high heaven
Is the dusty earth.
yet why the head 
droops down and down?

Comments

  1. AllwinJanuary 17, 2013 at 9:59 AM

    A master piece.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Seena KarimbumkaraJanuary 17, 2013 at 11:13 AM

    The true depiction of manual labour, whose hard work mostly goes uncredited

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sarat KasyapJanuary 18, 2013 at 5:07 PM

    Wasted lives, little more than animals: people whose names no one remembers, people whose joy, sorrow, love and pain make no chronicles… The believers may call this unfair, but agnostics acknowledge it as the uninterrupted absurdity of human existence.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. RajkamalJanuary 18, 2013 at 6:06 PM

      Dear Sarat, Its amazing how your comments precisely echoed my outlook on the subject and summarises the pain behind the poem. Hats of for piercing right to the core. Taking a step further I would like to say, what I have now realised for sometime, that living and surviving, be it for humans, or any other organism, follows the same 'absurdity', as you so aptly word it. All life breeds on inequality and exploitation. Humans are just doing it at unprecedented scale and pace. No wonder thus that the logical conclusion of all life is death!

      Delete
    2. Sarat KasyapJanuary 19, 2013 at 9:19 PM

      Thanks Raj... it was you moving poem that made me write this... incidentally, the absurdity of life, and the logic of death is the theme of the book i'm currently working on... we all confront the absurdity of life, how we try to overcome is what principally distinguishes one man from another... thanks Raj for the thought provoking poem...

      Delete
    3. RajkamalJanuary 19, 2013 at 9:41 PM

      Spooky coincidence I say!!! Can't wait to read your latest book. Do keep us fans updated on the same.

      Delete
    4. Sarat KasyapJanuary 21, 2013 at 1:51 PM

      Thanks Raj
      But you should collect your poems and write ups into a book, it'll make a great read, esp regarding the NE

      Delete
  4. BaibhabJanuary 20, 2013 at 2:35 PM

    "humdrum burdens of the customary civilization" Never realised that the ordinary could be great too, until I read this line. I am no judge of literary excellence, but this piece is among the best I have read. Keep chronicling the ordinary.

    ReplyDelete

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