Final Testimony

Creaking panes now gather moss.

Outside, the shell now is torn to its ribs,

Opened to the battery of sunlight and hail.

Within, the plaster is loosened and falls,

Leaving my walls with melanomic skin,

Blotched with the cavities of mortars and bricks

Which shiver to its core, in the traffic rush of four,

Coughing as a consumptive could.

Groping my way through the cobwebs of halls,

I’m startled by voices of faces on walls

That long back had marched by my side.

But streets we had rumbled with such heady feet,

Now parcel our dreams to far other states,

Even beyond immigration desks.

Left with the sideshow of clowns among graves

We live out our days among logsheets of crime

In a land that is jammed in its wheels.

Should I have learnt that things would be thus?

Should I, after all the unlearnt lessons,

After so many blunders

Of so many proportions,

After all the aeons of promises forgot,

After so many, and so much more –

Should I have learnt longer back

To purge myself of hopeless hope

And drink the gall of hate and loss?

Yada Yada Hi Dharmasya

Glanirva Bhavathi Bharatha,

Abhyuthanam something something

Tadatmanam etc etc…

Questions whirl in vacant air

And leap and twirl and whisper by:

Was this the end for which we fought?

Ours was not a paltry lot.

Back in that midnighted tryst full of hope

We all did have far grander dreams.

I plod through the fields of ancestral bones,

And even as I wander among rubble smelling blood

I search for a light that shelters us all

From all those blasts that have bombed through my dreams

And charred into ashes with insatiate flame

Seeds of a time that unawakened lie.

Our hopes have bled for long –

What more from withered veins?

The courage of impossible hope,

The vision of life through undying dreams –

Still would I pray for these.

Suffer us not to stagnate and rot,

Even in these climes, these desert times

Amid the rocks and bones and dying grass.

I wish to believe to the last.