Madhuri Katti

Hycean

Hycean was a hypothetical

A theoretical exoplanet

Made of Hydrogen and Ocean

The exoplanets which

We now know exist

Thanks to the presence

Of essential bio markers

Evidence of life elsewhere

Far far away

Whose signature spectra

Can only be seen

By powerful telescopes

It is exciting to know

We are not alone

Life can be elsewhere

Ah! Life is elsewhere

Maybe not be the kind we know

It may not be earth-like

It may be completely different

But here we are

Living evidence of

Existence of complex lifeforms

In the entire universe

Also having intelligence to

Decipher it all

From smallest to largest scale

A sea of evolved beings

Refusing to look inwards

Very reluctant to look at

Darker side of humanity

While we send missions

To the dark side of the moon

Absurd humanity

Which wages wars

With itself

We have pushed

Our pale blue dot

(Also made of 70 percent water, hydrogen and oceans)

To the brink

Maybe it will survive

Once we eliminate ourselves

Future will perhaps remember us

As dichotomous beings

Glorious ambitious ones

Who turned into blood thirsty beasts

And as beautiful intelligent ones

Who saw signatures of

Far far away exoplanets

Who were delighted

To figure it all out

To create knowledge

Ask and experiment relentlessly

We did live, they will know

We had our own sun

Our year was made of 365 days

They will find it all –

Evidence of our existence

And extinction!!

Image courtesy: Artemis II mission, Nasa

Travels

Intriguing migratory birds

With tiny magnetic compasses

In their tiny little being

Navigating with perfection

They travel miles and miles

Across from Siberia and elsewhere

To find their little green oasis

Their islets, wetlands

To stay and nest

Till the fledglings are strong enough

They are so faithful to

Their geography and biology

Tuned perfectly

To the Nature of their very being

I wonder how they perceive

The climate change

And the erratic weather

Also the flying drones

And fighter planes

All set forth by humans

To take over land and resources

That doesn’t even belong to them

Migratory birds

Are quite enviable

They don’t need papers

To prove they nationalites

They fly high above

Man made borders

Who knows maybe

They will be

Saviours of life on earth

When humans go extinct

Unkept Promises

Every Peace treaty

Every marriage

Every relationship

Every dysfunctional family

That fails

Has a history

Of Unkept promises

Promises which did not

Pass the test of time

There should be

A proper closure

For unkept promises

Or else they turn into deep wounds

They grow like cancer

Occupying spaces

Leaving no breathing room

They are like unseen

Elephants in the room

Which are never addressed

The room where

Where adults play

The game of pretend

Lies and amnesia

While teaching their youngs

Lessons of morals, values

And promises…

That promises are meant to be kept!!

Irony

I became you

And you became them

All boundaries blurred

Between predators and preys

Every role flipped

In a role reversal

Victims turned into proud bullies

Preying upon helpless victims

Me, you, us and them

We keep changing our roles

Going in circles

Irony itself has become ironical

Like never before

I has been replaced by AI

Human by machines

Humans have turned into

Well dressed mannequins

Frozen like zombies

Doom scrolling away

Devouring themselves

Life has turned into monstrous death

In the finest of all role reversal

They feel most alive

When they kill

A movie showing severed flying head

Gets all the screens

While life affirming Space film

Finds hardly a space

Addiction to violence!

Ironically life always wins

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Didn’t change anything

Cherry blossoms do bloom

And paper cranes are still a craze

Ironically the victim nation

Never built the bomb

It ended the cycles

Of trauma and violence

But the bully nation

That built and used it

Is back with the same flex

Ironically bullies often

Call themselves victims

What scares them?

Addicted to violence and power

They refuse to give up

Their carnal desires

While Artemis II is on its way

To the darker side of the moon

Humanity has plunged

The planet Earth

Into one of its darkest phase

How diabolical

And Ironical!

A Poem a Day

It is a good way of beginning

The ‘Cruelest Month’ of the year

A poem a day!

How else would one survive?

The daily calamities, killings

And mournings

The sense of worse times ahead

For Entropy always wins

The beautiful flower of yesterday

Is wilted, fallen and forgotten

Just realised I did see the Halley’s Comet

And then came the afterthought

I won’t ever be seeing it again!

It will come irrespective of everything

As sun beckons it every 75 years

Plants thrive on sunlight

Maybe they bloom flowers

For the Sun!!

A return gift maybe

For all the free glorious light

Plants know gratitude

While we seem to thrive

On regret, hate and revenge!

#GloPoWriMo

Poetry Ai’nt Luxury

If poetry were a luxury

Afforded by only few

The world wouldn’t have known

Realities of poverty, hunger and war

That lament of loss and grief

Poetry ain’t luxury

Thankfully

A little girl hiding in an attic

With just a paper and pen

Multitudes of thoughts and emotions

Finds an alternative realm

Realm of words and emotions

Those damn slaves, those blues singers

Poetry freed them from slavery

Songs and poetry of protests

Gave language, words and idioms

To the oppression and violence they endured

Poetry gave the moon and stars

Silver linings another meaning

Metaphors for hopes, love and loss

There wouldn’t be lullabys

There won’t be haikus

Long and short

Lyrical and free verse

Had poetry been a luxury

It belongs to those who own it

A craft they are willing to hone it

It says much even in its pauses

Brevity is its expanse

Poetry is a friend

Who walks along

Encouraging one to face life

It is like those fallen and trampled flowers

A true evidence of life lived and unlived.

Joan of Arc

Though there is ample evidence

That we were the harvesters, gatherers

While men went hunting and gaming

Maybe we were cave artists too

Though there is an ample evidence

That we did the ground calculations

For ambitious space missions

Carried out fatal experiments

To figure out x rays, radioactivity and

Even the DNA structure

Though there is evidence

That most anonymous writers

Too were women

They were also those wives, sisters, sister in laws and whores

Which gave the world stupendous art

Yet women have been historically ignored

Cast aside, taken for granted

Treated as a doormat

While men ran their victory laps

As they stood on the podium

The tray bearers were the women too

There is ample overpowering evidence

That we birthed the entire humanity

Every evil soul who masquerades as saviour

Started life in a mother’s womb

The very female sex whom he ended up

Exploiting, killing and silencing

How did we end up here?

Are we truly the weaker kind?

Or just too kind? Or too conditioned?

Passing on the intergenerational trauma

And patriarchy in equal measures

No wonder we end up being hated a lot

For trading freedom for freedom

That’s the only real deal for us

Be unfree, free, unfree, free

To be or not to be

We truly can’t distinguish between choices

There isn’t any escape route

From this foul role-play

We regale it in and we ace it too!!

After all we just have to call it day

And decide not to give birth

And watch homes and government scramble

With incentives and perks

We can pull off a demographic shift

Yet these imbecile fools

Disrespect and disrobe us

Rape and kill as per their will

There seems to be no end in sight

We are still in the recognition stage

Recognising the inequality

Still debating that patriarchy

Is the ultimate design

No wonder Joan of Arc

Was called a witch and burnt at stake

Only to be venerated later

As a patron saint and saviour

This game is too old

Can we move to the next level?

We refuse to be recognised in retrospect

We dare you to practice equality

Take those baby steps

Remember we women are good at it

To teach those baby steps

Watch you falter

Give us a chance to make you

A better human or maybe at least a human!!

Photo courtesy: My son, Anuran. This was clicked at Orleans where Joan of Arc led the war to save France.

Unheard Screams

She was out on the streets

Screaming about horrors

That went on inside a mansion

No one believed her

Women are always

Hysteric they thought

Before her there was another

A super model

Who tried to tell the truth

She was packed off

To the psychiatric ward

A filmmaker tried too

He died before

The world saw his edited film

Which felt like his perverse imagination

All this while

For decades men and women

Of power and influence

Kept mum even when they knew

They all partied, built a horrific reality

That the world thought was

Just a perverse imagination

They maimed, harmed and killed

In the name of fun and longevity

It took a whole generation

Of abused and trafficked kids to grow up

To call it all out, fight endless legal battles

Die mysteriously in the process

To bring it all to the light

With all evidence for everyone to see

Yet the world is numb

The perverse spy network

That controlled the world

Still thrives in money and power

Telling people to move on

Screaming only stocks and race

Money and influence matters

A handful few perverts

Reminding us that torture chambers

Continue to exist, cruelty never dies

In war between good and evil

Evil always has the ugliest loud laugh

While goodness stands shackled

Maimed, trafficked and brutally abused

No one believes the goodness anymore

What good does it serve to be good?

What kind of a rot is this?

Where screams of vulnerable

Women and children

Often go unheard

While men continue to flaunt

Their naked positions and power

Through utter cruel perversity

Shame on this selective

Deaf, dumb and blind world

Was it all like this forever?

Was free world, an illusion

That was sold to us?

Just like puppets we dance

While the screams go unheard

We scroll past all the horrors

To pause at delicate flowers

Or wellness reels

How many steps did you walk today?

Stars burn out too

Sun and stars may seem like

Permanent fixtures of our lives

Moving across the sky

The sun and other billions of them

They are literally a ball of fire

Constantly fusing atoms together

Depleting their reserves slowly

And very brightly

They are going to die too

Each one of them

Die and evolve into something else

Depending on how big or small they are

White dwarf, black dwarf, neutron stars

Or maybe a black hole

Just like every other being

The stars burn out too

And fade into oblivion

Their life timescales are too large

For us to witness

Like ours is for creatures who

Live for only for a bit

Nothing is permanent

Nor stars, nor universe nor we

Yet we keep seeking forevers

Knowing very well that

The cosmic dance can end any moment

Knowing that everyone will move on

Memories linger but that too

For a while, only a little while

In the grand scale of the universe

Sky, horizons, time, colours

Eternities and forevers are illusions

Stars burn out too…so do we…

Difficult Days

These are difficult days

When reality occults the dreams

It is bizarre isn’t it?

Reality that we try to figure out

Or try to make sense of ?

Is this also imagined ?

Then what is real?

What I think is real real?

The time that ticks away?

Or the dream that fades over time?

Is time too imagined?

Just like dreams ?

Sun does rise for real

But again it’s a play

Play of light, atmosphere

We see it before it even

Peeps over the horizon

While setting sun lingers elsewhere

It rises for us in full glory

It illuminates the tiniest dust particles

While darkness engulfs elsewhere

With no power to light their lives

Powerless have to make through

Another cold imprisoned night

Maybe darkness is a blessing

That hides the cruelty, rubble

That amputated humanity

Missing its phantom spine

Where do we go from here?

Dreams are the only ransom

We can pay

To continue existing

Dreams of freedom

And that hopeless hope

Stars twinkling away far off

They are the witnesses

Of how our sun was born

And our Earth came into being

How dinosaurs roared and vanished

Maybe if we can fine tune

From somewhere

Maybe it is still visible

How it all began

The eternal cycle of

creation and destruction

It is such a pity

We want to behold pleasure

Which comes at the cost of pain!

We want to behold AI

Which comes at the I

These are difficult days…