To Freedom. Poem by Durlabh Singh

One for your benign touch, one for my touch
Enchained
Oh spirit of freedom let thy mighty banner
Untamed
Pass over the unbidden bush with your clarion
Sounding
Wave thy lightning lance and brave the slaves
Binding
Like the ferocious western wind burning with
Feverish skull
Swording the hungry oppressors and mirroring
Their pelf
The wide sparkle of your movement putting
To shame enflaming
The glories of tempered self with
Melancholy tinge ungaining
The fenced gleam of your bloodless sacrifices
And caresses
Demolishing the hundred gates of frauded
Beleagured oppressors.


For many an ages I have pondered and piled
Arrayed in wisdom’s hand gleaned over dull cide
Suffered the quenchless agonies
Degraded at the jester’s hand
Of no avail the raven’s laugh or other
Palsyfying venoms
Stood under castled walls of vermin & swallowed
Falsehood’s fallen estate each brick and canker
Till silent became revolt and wounds the thistle
Of slavish tendrils paving the way
To sufferings and decay
At the hands of men breathing their pungent glaik.


Here on earth all things conspire to add more
Linked chains
To existence and its punishment redeemed as worms
Far away things dissolve like stray air while
The misery of littleness combs her hair
And clasp each sanctioned knave
With tight knit hands like rust colour fog
Thick in throat
Embossing each yondle and hoary eyed with
Stampeded stone
The dogs that guard their masters with empty
Coarser fangs
Night a failure like past frozen contained in lanes
Of ordinariness gathered in upgraded braces of
Boredom and fanes.


Rekindle oh spirit all the faded memories
Of mine
Quench with burning breath this
Uncompanioned hand
Enlarging my thoughts with new sense found
Beyond
Tired sameness of finches’ song in some brunt isle.
Wandering with cleft wanderers of visions
Clasp my hand and unfurl your flag then fly away
Out of this life’s everlasting misery
Its multitudinss nothingness
The grandeur of your thoughts beyond our
Little kens.
Cover the tired eyelids with oblivion or embalm
With your knifed reeds all my willowed solitary songs.


The dead drunk judge of our fate sits on
His high throne and changing the scenes on
The curtained stage
Every hour we act our little part soft salined
When enamoured hands rise to pay salutations
To canters of maze.
In one act we act as fools to please
The jocund public or our humiliations. In other
Acts we persuade ourselves to act as amassers
Of fortunes, a gay lord of septet castles
A prince of darkness
Like wild vipers when we stand apart from stage
And see all our mean hemlocks drained to soil the cage.


The truth is there to look but heart never accepts
Turning recuddling on its pampered steed
The hazardous tracks
Of wooded worldly paths, of envy of other’s fate
Riches of masters or deeds of anchored slaves
Each bosom here bears the bewildered bondage
Looking the way to Buddhahood spurned from intent.
Teach me to see that the world has as much reality
As myself and accumulation of grief does not
Make it inenser. Let not the stars melt into
Sobs which encroaches
The liberty to define think choose and of endurance.


Speed sagaciously freedom with your emblem flying
Despising and putting to shame this dull race
And all its kind
When stabbed and starved your followers
Unheralded undermined
Ring back the curtains that obstruct
Your follow through brine
Ring out the hampered pinnacle
That sultered every breath
Fence out the bondage that consumed
The gory skin and ketch.


Every ray of individuality
Every visage grand concealed
As if in the furnace of living
Burnt all the unwanted deeds
Purge away my belittled life with spectral gleams
Limitless be thy reach for flowers in gilded fields
Cast then as your prey downy slumbers of intellect
Give hopes to reapers of liberty of unyielding sect.