My Country - My People: Modern Indian Epic - 3 Poem by Seshendra Sharma

My Country - My People: Modern Indian Epic
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CANTO 111

What a relief

lungs of my soul feel

to leave Hyderabad behind

and float away into the air!

Thoughts begin to breathe again

after many months....

"How could this being live so long in the

poisonous air of that dreadful city? "

so saying, the trees of Nilgiris gently drew

me into their lap.

I wake up like a flower in the mornings of

hyderabad and walking in its roads I turn into a

rumbling volcano, ready to erupt.

I walk

holding up my pants, treading the post-

independence civilization and poetry that the day

of hyderabad vomits on the roads, like a chronic patient!

one should write poetry only in these roads.

Looking at government-marked faces, every next minute, all cannons in me burst.

Exhausted I look at the trees pitiably and say

" I do not want poetry"-

I want a bomb crammed with a thousand earthquakes!

How many such volcanoes, like me, are not walking in these very roads?

Seeing and breathing the carbon dioxide of this obnoxious civilization,

why these trees blossom flowers, why don't they bear bullets,

I shout at them;

This city, is my cup of poison, thrust into my hands by fate,

commanding me to drink!

All my passions and intoxications are in it;

It is here, that I lost my worlds and gained them; it was here

that my life alternated between gain and loss endlessly

in the cold-blooded race of life.

It is in these roads, that I ran like a howling storm,

and fell like a boat, that lost its sails-

I am going

carrying my memories

In search of a balm for these wounds.

life here spares nobody, ignites fire from man to man,

O bird! do not sing your song here,

fly away, in search of your own green hills.

* * *

In the city of man, in spite of hundreds of

people buzzing about, time, has the upper hand.

It is only the voice of time, that is heard, as

the single domineering voice, superceding all the

millions of voices of man.

It displays the portentous fingers of its

impeccable hands in all the clocks of the city. It

throttles the voice of man, ruthlessly with those

inexorable hands.

It descends on the chest of man, like an

iron eagle of gigantic shape.

But here in the hills, there are not days or dates;

there is not another single soul either;

time, which chased me to this place

collapsed, unable to follow me through the leafy,

and melodious labyrinths of these hills;

strange trees, stranger birds, smiling and defiant hills,

and the immense solitude that sleeps in the hearts of hills....

all collude and weave a spider's web of silence here, in which

the Time is caught like a tiny fly and meets its death.

The feelings of this place are like flowers

unsmelt by anybody before. The tree-tops here can

be reached with eyes only and not with hands;

Over the heads of those trees which are brushing

on the canvas of sky, a large white cloud rolls

by with big strides.

Breeze, lazily knits a delicate net out of

the breath of flowers, all around, in the blue space.

In the powers of unknown happiness, man

changes into melody, and flows in the bodies of

birds and hills; Man leaks away from the

gripping fingers of time's hand.

Even the little insect which flits around on

its wings in pure innocence and freedom, enjoys

the happiness gifted to it wholeheartedly by

creation, to the same degree as man can.

The insect is no less than Man, in the

borders of this land, where the hills rule.

Here the power of Man's ego, vanity and will

are abolished without a trace-

The unpolluted condition of pure life, alone

has the right. That is why I dragged Time into the hills and killed it.