We all felt we were immortal
Nothing would ever change
As a child of the village with
Acres of fields to range.
All these years later
So much has gone
Meadows under concrete
As time has moved on.
Gardens occupy those
Once informal footways
So some old shortcuts
Are closed these days.
Most streets are signed
And have streetlights
Some of the magic gone
From dark winter nights.
The imagined invisibilty
Of roaming girls and boys
But always given away by
The chatter and the noise.
My old home and Forge Cottage
Modernised, knocked into one,
The forge yard now under grass
The farm machinery long gone.
As a listed building the Forge,
Restored, still sadly stands
In a no longer working village
Now mainly commuter land.
The shops now long closed
To me there’s sadness in the air
I feel no empathy or connection
With the folk now living there.
Those good old days
Were at times quite bad,
Nostalgia has Its drawbacks
But now I feel alone and sad.
Occasionally I visit graves
But very quickly move on
I belong only to its past
My village now being gone.
My loving cousin
Nongmaithem Manihar Singh ,
had not seen for decades;
how time can sting,
after his passing I went
to his home at Yairipok Bazar
where memories roam
to attend the Asti sanchay.
That country market place
miles from my house in Imphal
I have not visited for a long time.
During my childhood days
long ago in the sun
I wandered there often
where the small market spun
that was busy only at dusk
selling fresh produce from the fields
and ground.
At the time of his mother's death
more than two decades ago
still it was a traditional marketplace.
My mother her sister had passed away
more than two decades before her
leaving a silence that echoed evermore.
After they left us our bond grew thin
we have not seen each other ;
it's been far too long since than.
That day
the rural landscape had changed
so much from what I remembered,
It felt like a touch.of nostalgia
The market place now was much bigger,
more bright modernised and crowded,
a bustling sight.
I recalled then the old days and my long past,
with memories swirling like leaves in the air.
20.01.2021
Once Earth was full of wild brutes,
Hunting animals subsisted their livelihoods.
Slowly, steadily they learnt upliftment,
What we accepted later as civilisation.
Today in this modernised world,
We follow new-fashioned approaches and genres.
Maybe we are greedy and gluttonous,
But we are affable and amiable creatures.
We live in society which is full of prosperity,
Where educated and education leads us all.
But day-by-day in this rejuvenated world,
Society demoralising at a whole.
Everyone is busy today, at their own work,
Youngsters are concerned enough about their own careers.
But there is a bunch of people in every society,
Who are always ready to criticise one's variety.
We should not fight with those evils,
Neither we embroil ourselves into ills.
We are confident enough to judge our own,
And to scorn the Judgemental Society.
Words forbidden to be expressed
A dangerous fact to be disclosed
Making the whole world depressed
I am sorry that you are so obsessed
With the words never to be expressed
The words are secretly decomposed
Scattered around after being recomposed
Spread like bean paste after being compressed
Taste like sweet chilli that’s been reprocessed
Eaten by idiots who are systematised
The paste lost its nature but it’s flavour is militarised
For the nations, hatred was perfectly modernised
Effectively fighting in the war that was standardised
Such usable propaganda must be fully released
Please sleep on people and be hospitalised
Don’t worry, you will soon be desensitised
Words forbidden to be expressed
A dangerous fact to be disclosed
Making the universe so confused
Wake up, ladies who were hypnotized
Come out, gentlemen who were fictionalised
From where you were unfortunately misdiagnosed
Where “I love you” is forbidden to be expressed