Abhimanyu was a teenager

Chakravyuh or disc formation of warriors :Google images

What we did to that kid  -  Abhimanyu -

has it changed at all?  in two and a half

millennia, a killer joke, heartless laughs,

a foetus remote-taught to break into

complex war formations, the chakravyuh

but without an exit. Choreographed

murder of innocents, children bluffed

drawn into war, and worse.  Takes quite a few

thousand years to wipe that clean, and don’t come

mouthing that love can fumigate all sins.

Strain and you can still smell that old bloodstain

and the stink of fresher ones through the balm

two thousand years and more to make some sense

of it, and still it doesn’t, not one grain.

Abhimanyu is a character from the Hindu epic Mahabharat, who listens in on his father explaining the disc formation used in war from his mother's womb and is sent later to battle with such a formation when he's just sixteen. He fights bravely but is killed because he heard only the  entry and not exit.

Missed linking up on last week's prompt on sonnets at dVerse, so here it is for the OLN

Which side of the border? and fence? and angle?

 

 

 

All your shapes are drawn into paper

as jitter-quivery as brains;
your limbs flared out a little
for balance on the water;
someday no-one will bother
to ask what it all means,
someday all the borders will smear,
and where  will cease to matter.
I ponder the asking of questions
that really have no answer - 
the lift of pig-snouts in and out of  
the muck and melees of rains;
the blinks of streetlights climbing into dawns.

 

East Bengal or Mohan Bagan?

which of the narratives, dialects
do you speak at home, oh none?
yeah, your accent’s wrongly clipped -
where did your foremothers come from?
where are your descendants going?
what do you mean you don’t know
when our lives are being ruined
by borders drawn long ago?
how do you take your riverfood?
that’s the wrong recipe entirely!
The silver fishtail thrashes in the bowl,
the nib gleams in a sad chuckle.

 

An ad banner for a photo club says

to focus on the bigger picture
and then choose the smackro-ed details
to rub into an artistic blur;
someone like me in her status updates
has “control” paired with “gun”!
Somewhere a man holds aloft a banner;
near home the march of a million.
I ponder the building of echo chambers
that have no other options
except to return the same last words.
The domes and arches of your minds
fade away into the shadows.

 

Why do you worry about the murdered

halfway around the world
when your sisters are gang-raped
and your brothers killed
bloodlines can neither be erased
nor can they be re-drawn.
Sister, who do you call brethren
and which side are you on?
Specify your birthplace here,
and where is your deathplace?
The forms crinkle their eyes at me.
The ancient bones of pyramids crack
before the secrets spill.

For my readers who are not Bengali/Indian, East Bengal and Mohun Bagan are football teams.  Bengal was partitioned into two separate nations based on religious lines during the independence of India in 1947, and there was massive displacement of people on both sides and horrific casualties.  The Hindus by and large came to India, and many Muslim families left their homes and went across to the other side.  Bangladesh has subsequently fought Pakistani control and become a sovreign nation in which struggle India too played a role. They celebrated their Victory Day on Dec 16.

The Partition is an event that Bengalis regretted then and some continue doing so now, it is artificial as the heritage and language and the culture is common. Even now, where an Indian Bengali has his roots - "this" or "that" side of the border, is an important part of his identity.  Signs of i.d. compliance, adherence to the correct protocols, supporting the "right" football team, cooking with the "right" recipe etc are given undue and sometimes quite ridiculous significance.  And we as a race elevate nostalgia to a fine art! Probably a little like the Irish from what I've heard, but then I wouldn't know firsthand :)

 

 

This week has been eventful in a bad way, too many terrible headlines right round the world, Sandy Hook, a young woman gang-raped in Delhi, political unrest in the ME, where to start or stop? Expressing in a poem is the best way to cope sometimes!

Shared for OLN @ dVerse

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.

Seeing red

I read the news, see gulmohurs cascade
their blossoms in a glorious spring red
I brew the coffee, I remake the bed
in the same half-hearted half-latte shade.

Spring repeats, the sheets of petals fall

again and again but the colours remain true
and here inside there is also nothing new
the usual violence, and the winner takes all.

I watch the news, see untold lives cascade

away in inflorescences of shocking red
I brew the coffee, and they count their dead
and that’s how nations, and my news, is made.

Let’s not talk about rights and righteousness.

Do you want your coffee with more sugar or less?