Monday 18 June 2012

Fields




War is not the only arena where peace is done to death ~ Aung San Suu Kyi, at her Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech


It’s true that war isn’t the only battlefield
where peace is stabbed to death, shred
into pieces by missiles, it’s also peeled
off by gentle hands and torn stone dead
every day in closed cells and sealed
yards, small rooms and the sweep of widespread
placid nods of automated heads.

 
 
And prisons too come in myriad forms
tightly curled buds, cells, walls, snug cocoons.
All life must constantly escape its homes
constantly force open the petals of fortunes
and sail on unknown winds, transform
painfully, trim, hack and prune
and all the same, die all too soon.



There is the life of prisons far away
and there’s life on a different plane
but violence filed in both their dossiers
repeated exercises of mechanical pain
hope and faith are so easy to mislay
when peace is shelled and shot again and again
in all-pervasive, relentless campaigns.



There are deaths on battlefields, and foetuses
strangled in wombs and quickly disposed
or else unborn still, taught clever bypasses
to adult war formations that closed
about warriors aeons ago. We repeat all the losses,
no lessons are learnt, no hostilities paused
only time and technicalities transposed.

12 comments:

  1. My dear friend,
    Very true and powerful words indeed!! It is also very sad with a child has to look at gunfire and wonder if it is fireworks. Very well written my dear.

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    1. The violence all around is very disheartening. Thank you for your encouraging words.

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  2. Beautiful thank U for sharing :)

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    1. Thank you, Recherche for coming by, reading and commenting :)

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  3. Powerful poem with tragic undertones, lovely.

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  4. abha!!! so touching sort of I felt like I was seeing the warzone!!!
    Loved this line
    constantly force open the petals of fortunes

    Keep writing

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    1. Thank you, Ramya for the support. Appreciate it much. abha? :)

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    2. abha means :D "uff" exhaling :D in surprise or shock :D

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    3. Thanks for telling me! :D abha in my mother tongue means "glow" :D

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  5. Thank you for this wonderful poem. I've felt these things so often in the last two years but never known how to speak of them. Your poem puts it all together in the right words...in some strange way it also heals the many wounds that war inflicts on all of us... sadly the balms are too few and the wounds too many too constant... :-) but i suppose that is what HOPE is all about :-)

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    1. Thank you, Kathakaar, for visiting and commenting. Agree completely that the violence is constant and comes at us from every direction...but as you said, one must hold onto hope :)

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