THE DILEMMA

 

MARVEL A. BARI

 

So, it’s me who is to question,

And also find an answer to the question.

And it’s I who is to give an account

For all your follies and discount.

And yet your creation does want

That, I should be left in perpetual want

Dangling between life and death.

Wearing a mask of breath.

That I should lend the eyes

And also supply dreams to the eyes.

That the thorns of life leave me in a pool of blood,

Yet, I must emit the scent of rose from inside this mud.

 

The twinkling, dwindling lights of the past,

Are under my care to last.

And yet I must raise new suns.

For the squalid homes and slums.

This black-mailing city of vultures and vermins

Pressurises me to create hearts. supplying them with thumpings!

To grow ever fluttering buds.

On the swamps of mud and soap-suds.

 

Gandhi, Buddha and Vivekananda!

All grown on bed of roses full of ‘Ananda’,

Often suffered at the hands of honest but crazy men.

But you hardly ever see here even ‘Hollow-men’!

They are all vultures, foxes, sharks or hissing cobras.

Changing colours like a chameleon, often and again,

In saffron robes, sandal-pasted forehead, suffering migrain.

That, you are bound to doubt your eye-sight!

Even in broad daylight!

 

Call for a Noah without the Ark

If there is a living God, He’d send a gigantic shark.

 

 

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