( “The Struggling Poor Child” )
She is a flower in this eyeless world,
A garment on this torn civilization,
A fallen feather from that human right,
A broken reality under that bridge,
Or, a profitless story you avoid, or, find –
On every heartless passage.
To upload her own little smile,
Or, to publish an aromatic season
On the petals of life and honey,
She is pale and fail from every dawn,
Baked by every terrible society.
Always sobbing with her sibling sorrow.
Always begging to battle for her bale belly.
When she was a baby,
Life turned off her joy.
Trapped between life’s minus and minus,
Finally, she stood on roads,
‘Hunger’ on her palms stretched.
And, she begged for a ‘Bread’ or a ‘Tea.’
Your hereditary ‘GET LOST’ is a damaging-ripple
In the capital heart of her illiterate-innocence,
When it is full of air, address-less hunger
And drops of hurt.
Sun and Moon are cosmic riders.
They come and go without investigating.
Still, she wakes up for a vertical-day, a working day,
To transform her infinite-hunger, living-form,
And ancient-gloom into blossoming smiles . . .
Oh, smiles may visit her once in a year,
Haves have those hundreds a day.
But not the case with chained-misery,
Because, they are born together,
From the same unlucky and poor womb.
How many faces has she won ?
Or recorded her ?
Or how many coins has she earned ?
Or minted for her and the have –
Nots and the vulnerable ?
( “ So very sorry,
I am the foxy-politico of silence and massacre,
I have to tour the world,
To get political, economic
And warring orange-monkeys’ supports.
I have to take and post
Modish selfies
With other costly suit-wearing-
Terrorists like me, fascist-leeches,
Federal-foxholes, uniformed-thunderbolts
(T)ruthless-venoms, blindest-weapons,
Fake-promises, empty-publicity etc . . .
I really don’t have time and tune
To domesticate the poor, the opposition and the minorities
And this and that
And the sad subcontinent.
My country people are born-idiots
And willing to suffer, burn, forget and die ” :
The Prime-(Tea)-Minister hallucinates
Like a saffron-samrat, like a saffron-zombie
Like a volcanic-tyrant
Of an intolerant Utopia, Bharath Pita,
Or, now a nuclear-tea-shop.
And imposed a forcefully demagogic night-tea,
A patriotic calamity or a money necromancy
For the fierce black heat of a beloved country.
Alas, withering the wonder
And the vulnerable people
Penny by penny, blood by blood
And surprise by surprise. )
Well, nothing left to lift the child,
( At least to a sustainable-smile of her 5 senses )
From a weary-loss and saffron-file
Of every blinkered day.
When she fruitfully interpreted that life lesson,
‘Pauper, the poverty people,
Can’t choose cash, cakes, meadow-rain,
Fearless-sleep, digital-insomnia and PPP,’
Then, she was already the remote control
Of political-poverty.
Yet, hope knows that she too has dreams . . .
And in her dreams, a Disney princess she is.
But, while she watches her on the mirror of Life,
Ah, that always implodes like a touch-me-not
And
( She )
Explodes
And
Explodes
Like a universally neglected (t)ear !
~Joseph Clement
Kerala, India