(Note- I wrote this poem about 13-15 years ago, today I would like to share with you)
Lying in the debris
Are dumb figures; limbs, trunks
And all;
The convex figure of
A female shape; a womb-tomb!
Dark, dark , dark and dumb at once!
Before the cries of creation,
Before the desirous dawn,
In a cradle rocked to death.
With tons of mounds of earth
On a million mortal pressing
Amidst the frantic jerks and jolts
Nature’s see-saw!
With furious rise and fall
The essence of life is withdrawn
Into the caves of chaos.
.
Side by side the others
Unmindful of their neighbours or
Close relations or even a better half
Lying emotionless, no kinship, no friendship
Within the earth’s crust.
After the sudden waves of
Fluid movement
In the earth’s sphere
Sympathetic with-
With the sudden fury of the Furies
Houses fall into
The earth’s vacant streams,
Cattle and all;
Nature’s tall green-guards
Fall unguarded – all devoured in a wink.
All have falling sickness
Sick, giddy Earth
It seems suffering from
Severe salmonella poisoning
A mother’s agony
Manifested in the failure
Of the various agencies
At the time of a national emergency.
We call it a calamity.
What they call it
Below the earth’s surface
We have failed to interpret
With the aid of our human language
And to control with the aid of our
Modern seismological gadgetry,
The seismic spasms of
The mother Earth.
A precious reminder
When we watch the orphans
Bewailing the loss of
The sky above and
The earth beneath.
When we meet the staggering shadows
In the streets
Without their props of living
Demolished and dumped down
Below the gaping grounds,
The monstrous yawn
With all the burden of living-
Trunks and all !
When we see a mother’s figure
Turned into an epitaph-
A precious reminder-
Her tattered rags are words
Written by Time’s indifferent hand.
Her dried tears of
Vacant eyes
Oblivious of the basic needs
Of human habitat:
Food, shelter and habiliment.
Obsessed with the loss
Of her sanity of flesh and bones
Her future roots,
Blasted, of no more use to her
Now for she has the sky above
And the earth beneath!
To sustain her
Failure to adjust to
The sudden shocks that
Shook our Motherland and
Of late, in the land of the final destination of Yeats’ paltry thing
And the land of Kazuo Ishiguro always
And yesterday Al Salvador
And tomorrow some new territories
Would be doomed
Demolished, crushed,
Built, rebuilt and
Man’s powerlessness
Before the mystery of the continental drift
Shall be solved
When we pray to Him
To his magnificent generosity
To build and bless
Out of the chaos of
Nature’s callousness.
We all suffer though far away
Or near the epicentre
We feel still the devilish
Intensity of tremors
In our heart’s innermost muscles.
They rend us like reeds
When we read about you
Or hear condolences offered by
Our colleagues from different
Nationalities- a precious reminder-
We feel the pain slow, sudden and
Long –
And in a vision I saw
A crowd of
Lingering lava spreading
Over the mind’s horizon and coming out
In streams of tiny globes of sorrow
Fall and are all splinters of
Burden and bliss of life stored for years
Bit by bit into bits and pieces
Gleaned from a demolished home or
An area completely doomed,
A staggering figure I meet again
Wrapped in a shroud,
Warped by the clouds of
Cold commotion.
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