Pranali Vg Poet Free verse

Desert of Duty

Who am I, walking not into glory,
but across this desert of duty?
Since childhood my hands have known the shape of buckets,
my shoulders carved to carry what the ground refused to yield.

I grew taller, but the path to the well did not shorten;
its dust braided itself into my skin,
its absence of comfort hardened into ritual.
The years have passed like caravans some loaded with promises of development,
some parading banners of progress.

Yet always I return to the same horizon:
the well, the bucket, the walk.
I have watched glass towers rise in the distance,
watched their shadows fall upon the villages,
yet no pipe was laid to end my thirst.
My thirties vanished in this absurdity.
The slow erasure of a decade measured not by milestones,
but by footsteps to and from the same parched ground.

Time here is not counted in birthdays,
but in the deepening grooves of a water-bearer’s palms.
With the beginning of the new century,
voices arrived speaking in futures,
their tongues ripened with words of abundance.
They offered horizons painted greener,
fields where the rivers would never falter.

They spoke of wells that sang all night,
of hands unburdened, of thirst to be quenched.
But the bargain was ash dressed as bread,
a mirror held out to blind us from the ground we stood on.
Roots do not follow the hand that would uproot them.
So the village held its breath and endured another set of summer and springs.

And still, the quiet unrest continued,
not of armies but of small hands against great machines,
not of slogans but of persistence,
the refusal to vanish into the indifference from forgetting.

So I carry the bucket still,
its weight a history,
its water a testament.
If glory does not arrive endurance will suffice:
to walk, to bear,
to stand as witness in this desert of duty,
where even survival is a form of defiance.

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