Twilight Existences
 |
Can you uproot the
uprooted?
|
Strong limbs, submissive lives,
Bruised palms, egos , souls untroubled
Abstracted
friends, love forlorn,
Ghost families
Ghost families
Burnt
faces, tireless dreams.
Undeserved,
even of punctuations?
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.
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?
droops down and down?
A master piece.
ReplyDeleteThe true depiction of manual labour, whose hard work mostly goes uncredited
ReplyDeleteWasted 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.
ReplyDeleteDear 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!
DeleteThanks 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...
DeleteSpooky coincidence I say!!! Can't wait to read your latest book. Do keep us fans updated on the same.
DeleteThanks Raj
DeleteBut you should collect your poems and write ups into a book, it'll make a great read, esp regarding the NE
"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