In The Grand Bazaar Of Modernity Poem by Mohammad Younus

In the grand bazaar of modernity,
everything is up for sale—
Shame, once a guardian at the gates of dignity,
now discarded like an outdated relic,
its absence leaving us naked to the winds of excess.

Sex, stripped of its sacred mystery,
paraded as mere currency,
its intimacy bartered for fleeting validation,
its depth drowned in the shallows of instant gratification.

Morals, once anchors of the soul,
now shift with the tides of convenience,
their weightless drift leaving us adrift,
in a sea where right and wrong blur into gray.

Collectiveness, the bond that wove hearts together,
unraveled into threads of cold individualism,
each strand frayed by the friction of 'me' over 'we, '
leaving us isolated in a crowd of strangers.

Humanity, once a shared light,
flickers in the shadows of self-interest,
its glow dimmed by the glare of screens,
its warmth replaced by the chill of disconnection.

Character, once the measure of kings,
reduced to a marketable façade,
its essence hollowed out by the demand for perfection,
its truth buried beneath curated illusions.

Righteousness, a beacon once sought,
now mocked as an outdated virtue,
its flame smothered by the cynicism of an age
that scoffs at the very idea of higher purpose.

Empathy, the golden bridge between souls,
cracks under the weight of indifference,
its collapse leaving us stranded on islands of our own making,
unable to reach across the widening chasm of understanding.

All that was sacred—
auctioned to the highest bidder,
in the name of progress,
in the name of modernity.

But tell me, when nothing is left to sell,
what shall we stand upon?
When the soul is stripped bare,
its treasures traded for trinkets of convenience,
what remains to nourish the spirit?

We have gained the world,
but lost the thread that ties us to meaning,
the thread that once connected us to each other,
to the earth, to the divine.

In the rush to conquer time,
we have forgotten how to live in it.
In the race to acquire more,
we have forgotten how to be human.

The cost of modernity is not measured in gold,
but in the erosion of the sacred,
the slow fading of the intangible,
the quiet death of the soul.

And yet, in the cracks of this fractured world,
a glimmer remains—
a whisper of what once was,
and what could still be.

For even in the bazaar,
amidst the clamor of trade,
the soul yearns for something beyond price,
something that cannot be sold.

Perhaps it is there, in that yearning,
that we might begin to rebuild,
to reclaim what was lost,
to find our way back to the sacred.

But first, we must ask:
What are we willing to give up,
to regain what we have lost?
What are we willing to sacrifice,
to restore the soul of the world?

MyKoul