That's All a Poet Can Do
 

How does -
The blue landscape of hunger
From the graveyard of an ancient temple
From the minds of a partitioned
Generation,
From the contradiction ridden
Wounds of a wronged country
Enter into a poet's soul?
How?

Every day thousands of footsteps
Step outside the chasm
That divides the
Green dusty muddy forgotten
Rural slopes of our Indian
Evolution
And the cultured yet decadent
Slum that legitimatises itself
On the margin of our Y2K sufferings

Is it the unseen Third World War
That divides all of us
In our identities , that we are searching for, in losing throughout the ages?

I always look into your
Humane eyes, for compassion.
Yet your cruel memory
Distorts history, into abandoned
Mysteries and bloody soul searching

I always ask for your conviction
Yet you have convinced
Your time into false eternity
Of hunger and shame
And no homecomings of millions
Who can smile with sunrise
And wait for all tomorrows

How did an unknown tune
Corrupt years of our freedom struggle
Into a growing self- doubt
Of another weak beginning?

Why does the map bleed
Inside isotopic loneliness?
And we feel the sharp cry of protest
In our bones
Occasionally
Symbolic to our belonging to it
Yet forgetting always

A minor player of worthless words
That is me
Where will I gather the magic
To heal your wounds
To parade the shining shivering
Glory of the million souls
And to rekindle our history
Of blood and tears?
A minor poet only, that is me.

Here a bouquet of words
I lay
And what else can I do ?