Safety Ablaze (43 Killed In A Fire In Delhi) Poem by Bernedita Rosinha Pinto

While the rich keep accumulating more and more
the poor keep struggling, compelling themselves
to go find work and earn their salaries;
they go look for jobs far and near
they go find employment in any nook and corner
so that they can feed their families
and uphold their responsibilities and duties
to their children and to their elders.

They have to care for their old parents
and provide them with food and medicines,
they have to provide nutrition to their own children.
So, out of sheer dedication to their commitments,
they leave home to find reasonable prospects and
to provide their posterity with a better future.

And just as they decide to pursue
consistent means of livelihood,
each one starts to venture out to be the bread winner.
They come to work and earn in cities and suburbs
they come to earn not in millions but just a few rupees
so that their families can eat proper meals
and go to sleep without hunger or any deprivation....

But this time, fate chose to take a different turn
when in a shanty building which housed many workers,
forty three people died in a blaze
due to suffocation and inability to escape.
What was death's resolution and ritual
that as together they worked, together they should die
when poverty itself had been so unjust to their life?

What was life's respect to those workers
when all what they wanted was to see
a little of contentment in the eyes of their children?
What was life's reward when in poverty they lived
and in poverty they died
due to other's negligence and lack of safety?

How could fate be so merciless
when back home awaited their poor families
that as they grow up, the same reality will repeat
that one day as young men they too will come to work
on those same jobs and live in same kind of buildings
and put their lives too at risks, likewise
where they too can perish by fire,
by suffocation, by silence of breath called death?