Like so many,

I have never struggled

To bring back youth that was lost,

For, I  moved not from my childhood days,

So full of songs of innocence.

 

Peeping from the frames of an antique

Slow-moving dead past

With faded torments,

Self-indulgent pity,

I saw a toxic political era,

A sea of scandal,

Where leaders for life view state assets

As their own cash cows

And place gains in international banks

While their poor people starve.

 

From my river of silence,

I saw men and women,

Hearts parched up,

Sinking slowly in the mire of depression,

Brutalized and victimized,

Standing the test of time

In the world of collective tangling.

 

Playing with the butterflies,

In the grassy plains

With scent of morning shrubs,

Pursuing my dreams

In the world of Superman, Batman,

Green Lantern, Green Hornet,

Spider Man, all connected to green,

I got transported to time and space.

 

I again opened the window

Of my childhood days

And I saw the fury of aerial bombardments,

The endless treadmill of violence and war,

Seventy thousand men raped,

In a year in one land,

Three thousand lives lost in a single  war,

Sirens wailing, women and children crying,

Babies fastened to the beaten

Leather breasts of their mothers.

 

I closed my window,

Never to open it again.

I talked to my Teddy Bears

And they  cried for me.

They held me in their arms

And together,  we cried.

They burst the boils in my heart

To drain the painful liquid away

While our ship cut

Through the waves of the night.

 

Pramila Khadun