'Bulldozer'-A Poetry Series Poem by Nida Nawaz

(1)
Bulldozer
Now it is no longer merely
A heavy machine
Rather it has become
The iron face of fascism
That has emerged across the nation

It now recognizes
Caps, beards, Clothes,
Accents, the mark upon the forehead,
The lines of fear etched across faces,
Stammering, and helplessness

Its wheels carry
The broken bones of the law
And upon its blade has dried
The blood of countless dreams

It does not merely demolish settlements
Or bring down houses
Rather it buries beneath the earth
The alphabet string of children
The prayers of the elderly
And the centuries old faith
That had grown upon the thresholds of civilizations

Yet,
From the dust of every demolished home
A new chinar of hope shall rise
One that will speak
Not to the bulldozer, l
But to history.

(2)
Whenever the bulldozer moves
The earth does not tremble
The Constitution of the nation does
Because every demolished home
Erases a question
From the borderline

And the Constitution
Carrying in its pocket
The folded address of a homeless
Keeps weeping
For a very long time.

(3)
The dust that rises
Behind the bulldozer
Is never just dust

Within it are dissolved
A mother's lullaby
A child's laughter
An old man's prayer
The blue sky
Of a young girl's dreams

The wind scatters it
Across the entire nation
So that every breath
May become a question

(4)
The bulldozer first demolishes
Doors and windows
Because
Doors have always welcomed
Never hatred

And windows against darkness
Are humanity's first luminous poster

When the last threshold falls
It is not the rubble that weeps
Humanity weeps
A mother weeps
The mother who only a few hours earlier
Had been sitting inside baking bread
Before her eyes
Rise the rubble, the bread,
And the questions of hunger.

(5)
Upon a brick
Of a demolished home
A white dove of hope
Still remains seated

The bulldozer mistakes it too
For rubble
But hopes never remain buried
Under machines
They write every time
A new address
For the open sky.

(6)
They kept believing
The bulldozer
Would crush ideas

They did not understand
The nature of reason
It transforms every oppression
Into a weapon of resistance

And one day resistance
Rises inevitably
As revolution.

(7)
In the first rain
The dust of the rubble
Was washed away
But upon the walls
The fingerprints
Still remain

They bear witness
That homes are not built
Of bricks,
But of hope
And hope
Can never be demolished.

(8)
They thought
The chinar would fall
They never read
The language of roots
The roots of the chinar
Are very strong

In the crimson red colour
Of its leaves
Is included the blood
Of martyred freedom fighters
The blood of
Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh
And others

Its roots
Write history beneath the soil
Where neither the wheels
Of the bulldozer
Nor the foot soldiers
Of a tyrant
Can ever reach.