empire

empire …

crackling embers of empire,

spew noxious toxicity,

lashing,

weatherbeaten faces,

scratching,

gnawing,

crunching marrow,

burrowing deep,

slaying,

praying,

selling,

wearing down,

laboriously,

chilling the furnace of principle,

doused by carbonated fizz,

rendering consciences inured,

consciousness cremated,

ash rising,

ascending,

exalted,

amidst hazy,

blurred,

just out-of-focus,

silhouettes of humanness,

shred,

minced,

chewed,

spat out,

cast aside,

stripped off the moulting skin of greed,

left out to bleed,

as vultures skulk,

and currencies’ sulk,

– markets open,

– the horde pounces,

scalping,

remnants of dignity,

as sweat pours off backs,

and as innocence roasts in shacks,

as the cacophony grows ever more shrill,

buy!

buy!

checking-in all humanity,

left to suffocate,

in a cashiers till,

as we writhe,

entwined,

savaged and ravaged,

by the diktat of Profit,

while,

innocence starves,

emaciated,

discarded,

flung into the cesspool of want,

trampled upon,

barbecued on Capitals spit,

while hollowed souls,

wracked by inert life,

seek respite,

from want,

hunger,

from ceaselesss,

merciless strife …

The Sound of Distant Ankle Bells

Artwork from Google

The Sound of Distant Ankle Bells …

​

Memories of those delicate tinkling bells,

casually fastened around calloused feet,

take hold of my waking moments,

and fling my thoughts back to a distant time,

where folk-songs were heartily sung,

joyful, yet hopelessly out of rhyme.

I barely saw her, a construction labourer perhaps,

hauling bricks, cement, anything, on a scorching Delhi day,

while in the semi-shade of a Gulmohar tree, her infant silently lay.

A cacophony of thoughts such as these swirl around,

yanking me away from the now, to my cow-dung littered childhood playground.

Now, a lifetime of displacement has hushed the jangling chorus of the past,

to a faint trickle of sounds, as distant as an ocean heard inside tiny sea-shells,

and …

… I know, that the orchestral nostalgic crescendo, rises, dips, and swells,

as tantalisingly near, yet a world of time away, as were the tinkling of her ankle-bells …

Artwork from Google