The bombs go up in the
trenches, streets;
missiles strike stealthily
the homes, shops, schools,
hospitals—everything
in their impatient way
that target the ‘enemy’
with precision
the skies are sliced up
and drip the red-orange-dark
fuelled by
the fire and hate that refuse
to abate, despite wars futile!
No, it is not rosy-fingered dawn
seen by Homer but
midday in inferno, about you,
around you, in real time, buddy!
Everything, everything is reduced to the
rubble, mix of broken
concrete-glass, shards all.
house-windows
look like the gouged-out eyes
of a tortured victim
doors, the gaping hole
of a mouth in a skeletal figure
haunting the ground zero;
folks search disconsolately for
those
bits that make the tiny spaces
their loving homes and stumble
across limbs, tiny, scattered in corridors.
The politicians toast victories, while a young
private weeps for his waiting sister in a
lonely home, near a muddied river.
Poetry mourns the loss of humanity.
Media talk of the heavy collateral damages.
In the din, drowned:
—cries of the wounded kids, asking for
The water and moms
and flattened hopes,
dead white flowers
mingle with the trodden
dust, debris
and dried blood
markers of another madness
unleashed by
some power-drunk men.
