The Story of History
The Story of History
Beyond those beaten days’ depleted daylight
Beyond the bathos of a pandemic bondage
With the resurrected sashay’s charmed night
Down in the dumps at the pretentious proscenium
A shy orchestration sans bark and bite
Afloat in the air of inarticulate mind games
Intuitive rains, first ever, like the touch of Midas
Informed dense minds and filled their dented bowls
Birthing the quartet of Vedas and similar works
There was this epic, longest ever , they say
Bales and bales of tales in miscible moral wraps
With a natal nugget, on tall righteous props
The Mahabharata with the Gita, like Mata, Pita
And its transcendental twin revered more
For a daily hosanna..the Ramayana with a deep lore
Banish-evil-battle-cries, confronting blasted minds
Search lights, self’s unfoldment and its kind
Her children made but never did dig history
But loved digging up its bedraggled mystery
To find bone dry drains, history’s torn veins
Below multi layered mud and muddled bricks
Twisted and labored logic on tensile testaments
Sites that suffered blights thru unknowable nights
To find the four battens , the debacle, to follow
Someone on the way labeled it Harappa .
All the while Light ruled, but rigours too brewed
Calling often for a reordering of ways so crude
Then there were slices of truce..
The Buddha..Shankara..
Of collapsed black holes the horizon was full
Faded for once their gravitational pulls
Exploding back as eternal stars ..
Kalidasa, Aryabhata…
Alongside kings ruled and kingdoms rolled
‘ Ruler’-coaster-rides on thrones and thorns followed
Till bandit chieftains erased the all important lines
To the dance of dust from an advancing west
Battling to drop anchors on motherly chest.
Bare-faced brigands. Among their odious offspring
Some stood out to shine with a stupendous ring
Either putting up statecraft’s show pieces
Or scripting epitaphs in eponymous edifices
Till dissipated and deterred they too heard
The trenchant call of folks come from far to trade
That would spell , in time, your damnation
In manacles of measured manipulations.
Against its prolonged , protracted reticulation
Rose legit gripes from gregarious formations
That would coalesce under the one and only Gandhi
Into their momentous waking into life and freedom
Split up, as it were, into two bickering fragments
To play fitfully, for ever, their petulant fiddles
Averse to complement under demagogic detours
Falsely comfy under the convenience of inheritance
-2-
Six decades of self rule on, your children feel conned
Not for failed hopes, but for the disharmony that haunts.
An one- sport -nation fixated with a fixing -fame-game
Movie-obsessed , and with its TV
Blank beyond trivia and brand names.
Money and food are no problem for many
But, for too many, they are; vehicles are plenty
But roads aren’t ; laws are varied and abundant
Some redundant , but every pervert who counts
Interprets them different and funnily implements.
Health care wears a five star halo sans humaneness.
It never frees a dying adult or kid from its kinky tubes
Nor permit the company of kin to them for one last time
Ignores the terminally and unmovably sick stuck at home.
Agriculture does well, but farmers don’t ,.. and kill themselves
Petty retailers are swell making a killing, selling farm produce.
Stupidity grows muscles to muzzle humanity
Hunks grow on vitamins, video games and vanity
Freed millions press after pelf and power, plays hell
With the weak and the women , their perennial fair game
Profiteering, covert, overt, and across the board
The sick, the student, the seeker after any service
Any victim or one with a gripe being its victims
That’s by the very cream , no less, all the same
Media scream with scam and spam all the time
Even the ones,( that’s about all), with their own aims
The combined do’s of brash bravado and venality
A rash on governance and a blot on name.
Effete ethics and moribund morals, seniors mumble..
‘Equality before law’ means ’ Advantage to the outlaw’
Freedom for the grabs means restraints to many
Succour often hard-to -reach and reaching-too-late
Louts and lousy offices dot street corners and roads
Governance press after targets too disparate
To cohere or collaborate towards a wholesome goal,
Leaving holes for private or pet agendas to infiltrate.
Front-end-folks or prickly pears?
Menace, malice, avarice, lies, police…
Unrestrained delight in deliberate discourtesies.
Why -dad-anyway-Why- not- call-him-uncle-attitudes…
What does not tempt is in for contempt,
Being irreverent to the important, and indifferent
To the different, is the norm and the trend.
Democracy could well slip into demonocracy
Like when “Two wolves and a goat vote to decide dinner”**
In the absence of the Will to lift it to meritocracy?
PS: This poem ( 100 lines, 777 words, as it turned about to be ) is about INDIA, my country.
*”Mata, Pita ‘ mean Mother, Father
** Based on a quote seen somewhere.
S.Jagathsimhan Nair, 26 May 2013,
For Cyndi MacMillan’s contest.
Copyright © S.Jagathsimhan Nair | Year Posted 2013
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