On Hampi Poem by Praveen Kumar In Shobha Priya

Hark the rock relics,
The grim granite blocks of old old days
Which proudly textured an empire's pomp,
Now air old fabled tales in distraught shreds,
Scattered, uncared, in huge wasteful rubbles,
Like ghosts that lost its resting place
And writhe in nightmares about old halcyon days.


The mute witness of man's pinnacle of splendours
And dizzy rise of creative efflux.
Bespeaks of man's feral rage to revenge fellow-men,
His bestial strength possessed of ravenous indulgence
In ravaging the fruition of centuries' steady growths.


Hampi did not die a senescent death,
But a horror's sad demise in young flowering days
While strength and charm all-sparkled in mad riots,
It was a facinorous brazen homicide;
Each harrowed shred of fallen Hampi
Sprightly throbs in mad quirks of youth;
It roars aloud its right to life
And relives the pomp, unmatched and unheard.


Hampi is calescent
Even in the midst of nerve-chilling rock relics
And breathes to life who larked and languished,
Made love and hate and laughed with the stones
And grieved with the stones in wild fits of passsions,
Then held head raised in imperious grace,
In warm sunhine of imperial pomp,
In regal calumn of the niggling stale world,
Though borrowed and ignored now in saddish huge piles.


The squares where enemies dared not to tread in dreams
And the halls of rock-walls of imperious honours,
Now why, the fugacious fate has writ to breed vultures and theives?
A living huge trove of blithe opulance of past,
Of jewelled art-makes and musics and dance,
Of frolic-rid talks of agile happy men,
Of high trade and sex and tinkles of arms,
Of stables and baths and unending water-ducts,
Look desolate and grey like a burial ground.


Once a busy bee-hive,
Now a sepulchre of lost splendour's heydays,
Which dared onslaughts of the nature's fury
For centuries on and centuries off,
But unmoved in strength and pristine charm;
Hampi pronounced its impregnable youthful pomp,
Undying but for concerted wild forays
Of savage brutes for months inccssent,
An all-out blood-curdling inhuman rapine;
Hampi now lies in glory's mute ruins,
Hampi now lies in glory's mute ruins,
Obtesting how elusive is rise and fall.