Digging For Wealth Poem by P K Joy

Ever since your birth on this earth
You’ve been always digging for wealth
Not really knowing its use and its worth.
Maybe you’ll continue to do this till death.

Many years back I saw your father,
Prior to that I had seen his father,
And still earlier your great grandfather
Digging to gather, hide and disappear.

Your father ruthlessly committed murder
Of an encroacher of land - your next-door neighbor
To get back his land of one foot square.
Through a murder his one foot of land he did recover!

I saw your grand father, in public, insulting
A borrower who helplessly failed in refunding
A small amount of loan he had taken for the wedding
Of his daughter. Hot tears, I saw, the man was shedding.

Your great grandpa cheated men unlettered
Wrongfully bought their homesteads and gathered
Vast extents of land and became big landlord
And sent the farmers away, all empty-handed.

Where is all the wealth they in those ways gathered
And the one square foot your father had recovered


Whose value your father, ruthlessly, considered
As higher than the life of the neighbor he murdered?

Have any of that wealth your fathers carried?
Have you inherited? Or have they been buried
Somewhere to prevent their coming into your hand?
Are you digging only to find what they left behind?

Not getting the treasure, if, tired you dropp dead,
Will it make any difference to you or others of this world?
Why elbow co-diggers? Is it for gaining speed,
Or for enlarging the prospects of your find?

What will you do with the excess of your find?
Bury in the earth? Or give to those in need?
Is this sheepish smile an answer to what I asked?
Don’t you have a reply to give in simple spoken word?

Here come roaring replies, from the murdered neighbor,
All the cheated farmers and the insulted father:
“He must dig harder to cleanse the sins of his father
And to pay up huge fines for the crimes of his forefathers.”