ANOTHER 9/11

As American alchemy transforms

Third-world sweat and blood

into their Starbucks and McDonald’s,

and builds empires upon the debris

of war-torn nations,

buying bread with bullets,

so the 9/11s of Chile, Egypt and the Jews of Nazi Germany*

get erased along with the fall of the Berlin Wall,

To make way for the 3000 dead in New York

on an azure September morning.

All lives are not equal.

Yesterday, on November 9, America waved into the

world’s gobsmacked visage

a racist, misogynistic, hate-spewing Trump card:

That too was a 9/11. For the rest of the world.

Yesterday, we had a 9/11 that crashed the

economy, converting coveted notes into

paper and nothing more.** As banks and ATMs shut down,

as if in mourning, and social media brimmed

with Trump-struck woe,

I felt for a moment the world shared in my grief—

A humongous pathetic fallacy—

My own 9/11 that splintered my days

into before and after, hijacked my life and

flew it into the skyscrapers of

Ceaseless Avarice, to burst into flames,

To hurtle down sans grace,

And to splutter in the ashes, facedown in muted sorrow:

Tragedy must be a class act, or spectators get bored;

No listeners for a broken piano, so you better soar.

A wannabe phoenix, this was my 9/11.

NOTES:

*Refers to the US-backed overthrow of the democratically elected Chilean President Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973 and the bloody dictatorship that followed; the signing of the Camp David Accords that signalled Egyptian and Arab humiliation on September 11, 1979; and the Kristallnacht pogrom by Nazis upon German Jews on 9 November 1938.

**On 9^th November 2016, 500 and 1000 rupee notes were demonetized in India, leading to widespread panic among the common man and bringing the economy to a stand-still

SONGS FROM THE HILLS

There’s a certain cold blueness

that wraps round the mountains,

slides down the pepper vines

choking the spiky coral trees,

blooms with the elaichi buds in the backyard,

and brews in the black tea

that you sip, shivering under blankets.

Sweaters and mufflers can ward off the chill,

But what do you do when the soul feels cold?

**********************************

Wisps of mist swirling over peaks

to embrace the snowy puffs

valiantly swimming through louring grey skies

that leak day and night, drip-drop-drip,

In a fine powder-rain.

*************************************

These hills, they hold secrets as ancient

as the hills themselves.

The oldest and the truest of them all?

“To love is to lose, and to lose is to love,”

whispered the wrinkled hills, with a sigh

that echoed in the wet valleys.

Poetry in a Time of Terror

Tonight I cannot write

Of love won and lost,

Dreams dreamt and burnt,

Palm fronds silhouetted in the moonlight,

Salty rivulets coursing down my back

in the summer heat.

Tonight I cannot write

Of twilights in russet splendour,

Jacarandas raining down on my graves,

Labyrinthine daily mundaneness.

Tonight, when flowers are doused with kerosene

and set afire; when the craggy moon spews blood; when nightingales

are strangled and sparrows hanged; when humanity is splintered

to make coffins for the young with old eyes;

when fetters festoon every heart and hearth;

when streets resounds with the footsteps of fear;

when they stifle, muzzle and muffle, with the mob behind

baying for blood—your blood—which

would be ideal to varnish their nation

which once was yours as well; when to think is to feel

is to question is to die—instant annihilation or a slow

dismembering of your memory, your history, your very being.

When ghettos spill over and smudge coffee tables, desks

and benches, parchments and temperaments; when the dappled tree

shades where we walked scream an eerie silence; when the letters

vaporise from the books we read; when the lakes

freeze in the centre, afraid to lap their shores,

and the peacocks forget to squawk; when the cold stars sing dirges

for the newly dead and dying, in a land where

they alone live who have already died—

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.

Tonight, with my son at my bosom breathing baby’s bliss,

I weep for the ashes of my yesterdays, and for his tremulous

tomorrows that shriek with outstretched arms.