Wednesday 20 August 2014

On Mahatma Gandhi or Pleasure without Conscience or Pleasure of living

Joel Robinson Photography source

The shy kid* who walked like a shadow

Was once a 13 year old groom

Butterflies never left his stomach yet his stony words

Hit his child wife in their room

 

Squabbling kids!

 

The razor’s age he had trodden

Hacked and hardened his diffidence

The girmitias** held him in esteem

And some with nonchalance

 

Hail the change!

 

His easy way was bizarre to the worldly men

Hanging a smirk on their face

Eyesore that he was needed to get rid of fast

To save the man’s own race

 

 God save the Man!

 

But the bullets targeted his chest to stop that beat

Of the simple man

Red birds flew up from his bosom into the void and his words

Were the silent sun

 

He is no more!

 

Mercenary killers still walk and I hear their footsteps

In channels and paper

The red birds from the remote past bring me the silent sun

And words dance and caper

 

Poets still live!

 

 

*Mahatma Gandhi

**girmitia was probably distorted form of ‘agreement’-workers who were hired from India to work as bonded laborers in South Africa. They were deprived of basic human rights. Gandhiji fought for them in SA.

 


Written for Susan’s Midweek Motif: Social Goods @ Poets United

&

Shared with d'Verse Poetics