COLOUR

It’s a new day.
Begins with a little ray,
As the small yellow eyes
Of the sun blink open.

The morning light
Bathes the world beauteous white;

Sweet shower of rains
Slaps the earth, it pains,
Turns dirty brown and drains
Away.

Clouds gather, thunder-
The earth is dark as murder.

But the sun peeps in
And halos the sacred dance-
Yellow, white and dark skinned,
The dancers form a conglomeration
And merge into the rainbow
That be globlisation.

A new day indeed.

WE THE OTHER PEOPLE

[Displaced tribes in the valley of Narmada due to the construction ff the Hirakud dam.]
A moment that wrinkled history,
A moment that unwound time,
And made it stop.
The moment that caught us too happy…

Centuries of existence made us love,
The land, the plants, the animals,
The river which had recorded our silted history,
The tongue which we spoke in nature’s voice,
The culture that defined us and made us whole,
The moment that was to fossilize our lives
And bury them under the currents of development.

The moment stretched to new places,
To an unfriendly world,
To a relearning of life,
To tin huts and floods,
To poverty and destitution,
While the wooden memories, the remains of our homes
Grew sodden in the floods like ghosts.

The moment shall pass, they assured us.
We will learn, they told us.
The warped moment would plummet our country
Into a new era of modernity.
We afterall, are the other people
Meant to be lost in the tectonic wrinkle
Before the shift to greater things.
Akshaya Kamalnath.

WINDOW PANES

Through the window panes of life,
The darkness resounds
And the silence abounds.
The mist thickens, whitens......
New places arrive,
New people connive,
i look for familiar faces
But the panes get clouded.......

I pine for the past,
Itch to break open the pane
How long will I last
In the suffocating present?
Newness ought to be more pleasent...
I try to wipe the panes clean
But where is the old sheen?
Lacklusture abstractions threaten
To take over,
I struggle for one last peek.
But the panes get clouded.