Fire Within Poem by Raj Arumugam

did you think you could stamp out the flame
in the human heart?
did you think you could enslave
and destroy the spirit within?
did you think
law-twisting people as serfs and slaves
and as children ignorant of the world
but enslaving them in shoe factories and candle factories
and in the farms and in the sewers and chimneys
could kill the sparks in their hearts and minds?
did you think you had reduced their being and very life
and had numbed them to nothing
but work-mechanisms that obeyed
just because you saw them bent
and narrowed to an animal existence?
did you think you had them crushed
and under your thumbs
because they could not protest
and they held their heads and shoulders contorted low
and you had their limbs
and fingers so distorted
they could not lift their eyes to the horizon?
and just so
as long ago you had had Spartacus
and his freemen and freewomen
and free children crucified?
did you think you could reach out into their guts and intestines
and their brains and their blood and their minds
and their very nerves and hearts
and did you think you had suppressed every thought
and every star of their dreams
and that you had them completely distorted
and had every fiber torn and dehumanized
and made animal and tamed and then removed?
you did not expect them to raise their heads, did you?
you did not expect them to see beyond
the distance of their shadows, did you?
you did not think the unfed and the subjugated
could still hunger in their minds, did you?
and did you think you could sit in your gold-plated
and diamond-studded walls forever and forever
and talk for all eternity
about your dreams for your own blood
while you robbed innocents and defenseless of their own?
how could you,
though yourself human,
not understand
you cannot snuff out the human spirit -
or was it you who had lost your humanity?





(This poem was inspired by the dramatic painting Burlaks on the Volga by Ilya Yefimovich Repin; this poem has been expanded to include the human condition beyond the historical context of the painting)