Age Of The Criminals Poem by Alexander Raju

The criminals of the day
With a glee in their eyes say:
Don't regret about our past
That's gone forever,
We retain its darkness fast
When our brute instincts devour.

Once there was an ugly time
When we arranged child marriages,
But then the parents kept them
Safely in their custody
Until they became matured;
And now our so-called culture
We brought back proudly, instead
Of child marriages, we rape
Brutishly our little girls
And even cherubic infants
Inhumanly ignoring
Their angelic innocence.

Once we arranged ‘Sati' of widows
That saved them from future torments,
But today the husbands themselves
Prepare the pyre for their live wives;
Once we conducted human sacrifice
To appease our heavenly gods,
Today we do the same to please
Our human gods of power politics.

Why should to an old culture we go back,
To the waste of an uncivilized age?
Aren't we still practice those disgusting acts
We discarded on the way to progress?

Gondar, Ethiopia
June 2019