Tag: poetry

Waiting Time

We will certainly wait

But for how long?

Can you hear the collective gasp?

Can you see the crimson pyres?

Sorry, there is no waiting time

In this game of death!!

How long do we wait?

For better sense to prevail

For wars to end

For children to get a chance

To live their life

How long do we wait?

For the Time that never arrives

Time of peace

Time of love

Time of kinship

How long do we wait?

For the rains

For the barren land

To become green again

For the earth to heal

How long do we need to wait?

For the stars to be visible again

To be able to breathe again

Perhaps sing again

How long do we wait?

For a day without news of abuse

A day with no school shootings

No war or no killings

No rapes or acid attacks

Just how long?

Just how long before we value

Humanity and living

How long before we value

Equality and love

We have been waiting

Far too long

Too too long

To find ourselves

To love ourselves

Immortality

There are ways to live forever

Through your sheer talent

There are ways to be

Remembered fondly

By gently nudging the broken souls

Be it Van Gogh or Sylvia Plath

Or countless many more

Who struggled for existence

Struggled to pursue their passion

They died as mere beings

Unrecognised mortals

But lived forever

As Immortals…

Time truly

Is a game changer

The more you 

Try to hold on to it

The more quickly it slips away

And then without

Your knowledge or approval

It makes you live forever

As immortals…

Condemned to be

As per everyone’s

Imagination and perception!!

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!

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.

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…

Far too Long…

It takes far too long

To figure out the right from wrong

It takes far too much

To comprehend how much is too much

It takes a lifetime

To figure out life is about time

Sometimes it’s far too late

To let go what is already lost

It takes too long to figure out

There isn’t any blue print

And there isn’t much to figure out

By the time we find the puzzle pieces

It is too late

The puzzle actually is being undone

And not all pieces fit in

It takes forever

To know that silence is eloquent

Conveys more than words

It takes too many wars to know

To know what actually is at stake

And wars go on far too long

And love?

We can barely hold it for long

It slips through fingers like sand

The moment you define it

It becomes a possession

A caged bird

Which rarely returns when set free

It goes away far too far and

Far too long…

Sometimes It Is Too Late…

A petit pink fresh flower

Fell on the roadside

Just detached from the mother tree

I thought of picking it up

On my way back

As I walked ahead

A big SUV passed me by

At the end of the lane

As I turned

I saw it backing

Into its marked zone

To park perhaps

To my utter dismay

The wheels went over

That petit pink flower lay crushed

Beneath the mother tree

Sometimes it is just too late

To  behold, cherish and save

Beauty is often fragile and transient

Always ending up crushed

Under the ruthless

Wheels of the civilization

Sometimes it is too late

Most times it is too late!!

Stranger

A stranger stares at me

Whenever I look at the mirror

A school girl with two pigtails

A college goer

A trekker

A writer

Stranger takes many forms

All forms seem

Like a figment of imagination

The mirror itself has gone missing

The images are stuck in my head

My self tries to time travel

I climb the hills

But I go out of breath

The pigtails are gone too

A writer perhaps still thrives

Who will keep record

Of all these strangers?

They grew up with me

And then abandoned me

Or maybe I abandoned them

It’s not just them or me

The world has become a stranger too

Victims have turned perpetrators

Little children no longer grow old

To stare at the mirror

To remember their many strange selves

As we go further to discover

Ever expanding edges of the Universe

We seem to be collapsing

Just like those stars running out of hydrogen

We are made of star dust after all

Stars taught us to go nuclear perhaps

Just like a habitat with prey and predators

We continue to live in a concrete jungle

Though roles get reversed in every epoch

Predators become prey

Hunted turn into hunters

How long will it take for us

To be humans?

Mirror has no answers

My many selves and versions

Collapse into one too

The one that is trapped

Behind the mirror or screen perhaps

A virtual self…a stranger

Stares back at me!!