Mouna Vrata - The Vow Of Silence. Poem by Hardik Vaidya

The vow of silence.
Terrorism across the border,
Innocents killed,
Their lives hung on the politics of a failed state,
Drying in the sun of apathy.
Waiting for a shrivelled slow death,
At the hands of brutal idiocy.

We cannot talk to Pakistan.
Neither can we listen to our own people.
Nor shall Pakistan stop its terror vending machines,
We will not hit them, because it costs us more,
Lot more than the dead futures of those maimed and murdered,
It risks the future of our children who will be spared,
Of the mindless massacre.

Our decision to not talk,
Pakistan's to not listen,
Ours to be deaf to them,
Theirs to be a dead Democracy,
Ours to be a Democracy,
Wheeled in to the Out Patients Department
Of a Government run hospital,
No doctors, no one to attend,
Bleed to death,
At the hands of apathy.

Mothers on both sides,
Think of what shall become,
Of the child that grows
In their wombs.
Fathers prance around,
Like tigers in a cage,
Some take to guns,
Some to silence.

The child yet born,
Is left forlorn
To find his own,
Between a dead and a comatose
Democracy.