Precious Disaster

(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The essence of life is withdrawn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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