Dirge Poems -4 Poem by ashok jadhav

1. Death Caused by Injustice or War
They fell where flags had promised hope
And bullets wrote the law;
The earth grew red with borrowed blood
In someone else's war.
No trumpet names the broken child,
No medal heals the dead;
Justice arrives too late, too clean,
To hear the prayers they said.
2. Lost Innocence
Once, the world was soft with trust,
A place of open hands;
Now fear has taught the child to flinch
At shadows it commands.
Innocence did not fade with time—
It was stolen in a day;
And youth learned early how to grieve
Before it learned to play.
3. Forgotten Lives
Their names are missing from the stone,
Their faces from the page;
They lived, they loved, they vanished whole
Between one age and age.
History walks past their graves
With hurried, careless feet;
Yet dust remembers every soul
Time tried hard to delete.
4. Death of Traditions or Values
The songs once sung at twilight's edge
Have lost their living tongue;
The hands that knew the ancient ways
Have stilled, or grown too young.
What dies is not the custom's form,
But meaning's fragile thread;
A culture breathes through memory—
Forgotten, it is dead.
5. Collective Historical Tragedy
The ground remembers every cry
The present dares forget;
Each ruin is a sentence left
Unfinished with regret.
We inherit grief we did not earn,
Yet cannot walk away;
The past is not a closed wound—it
Still bleeds into today.
6. Lament for a Dying Culture
The language thins on elder lips,
The rituals grow few;
The future learns a borrowed song
And calls it something new.
A culture does not die at once—
It fades from daily breath;
Lost not by violence alone,
But silence, slow as death.