Where Has Love Gone From My Progeny? Poem by Ajit Das

Paper aeroplanes flying over the barbed wire
of Gulag, picked up by passers-by,
posted to addresses indicated there on,
were clandestine letters: the only connection to life,
desperately trying to reach families
of those banished to distant freezing labour camps.

The bellowing smoke from the furnace
of the concreted death chamber,
erected at eerie Auschwitz to purify Aryan blood,
was laden with ashes of millions of Jews
gassed, shot, burned as final solution engineered
to wipe out a race from the planet.

Then, at Guantanamo Bay and other black sites
all over the globe ghost detainees,
subjected to bestial methods of interrogation
excelling in inhuman ingenuity to elicit information,
were human alphabets recording harrowing tales
of fight for survival in the abyss of animal kingdom.

And cruelty stalks on, unchecked, remorseless.
One is beheaded, another burnt alive,
a girl gang raped, the wounded shown mercy
by bullets pumped into their writhing bodies.
The primordial man ponders, turning in his grave:
where have love, compassion gone from his progeny?