Poems From India in Grief: Terror Attacks in Kashmir in a Conflict-ridden World

FROM PARADISE TO PURGATORY

Why and how do sins breed in blood clots?

How do demons masquerade as men?

Why do flailing branches cry for help?

We are caught in jigsaws with burning eyes

As war intervenes the peace of prayers

A bleeding horizon rains throttled tears

The sun sprays tremors on pallid souls

A gory heaven on earth in wailing crimson

Bayonets and guns killing the apples

Chinars and pines of blushing innocence

Icy beauties of stainless verdure erased

In the detritus of a fallen civilization ---

Faith now a pack of cards plummeting in hell-fire

As the monsters rage, rave and howl

Running berserk these beasts of prey

Among dead bodies scattered in the rubble

With the stunned silence of a mortuary ---

No sooner did he say “Lord forgive them

For they know not what they do!”

Their brutal onslaught ravaged Nature라이브 바카라 beatitude

As strewn corpses whimper like trampled petals

“Do you know the way back to Paradise from this Purgatory?”

Pulsating trauma strangled into stones of numbness

What cruelty, what answers, what punishment?

When the world becomes a blankness

Straight lines of thumping hearts stop

With tears guzzled in opaque icebergs

A pervasive gloom

Jagged spouts of venom

A restless vacuity

In lost oceans of humanity---

OH THE PROMISED LAND

Monstrous canopies of

dark wooly clouds spurn us

but remain our daily shelters

our bruised bodies shelled

our bellies of wrenching hunger

kith and kin now cadavers

under debris of our lost homes ---

Trucks keep approaching us

with sirens evocative of silence

the battlefield keeps growing

numb like scythed cornfields

in the dismay of winter storms

yet no cessation of ravage

for long eons of deluging tears ---

We were such great friends and

neighbours holding hands in playful fray

our lands mixed and merged infinitely

like our blood and hearts in love

till borders of the mind cropped up

like bristling fences in our ruined gardens

missiles raged with machine guns

mourning in black rain and tears

while machinations ruthless rule for power ---

We were born from the same roots

from the same testament of faith

from the same soil we tilled for food

when marching soldiers from distant lands

came to divide rather than unite us

they poured acid on our promised land

divine bonding of ages ruptured in a moment

their bombardments now continue daily

regular amnesia and relentless cannons of hate ---

Our brotherhood broken like scorched twigs

slender strings of tenderness burnt to ashes of lava

the other day food and relief arrived after ages

like a fugitive rainbow in the weeping sky

but they broke our outstretched arms

we ran after them with our starved stomachs

wailing children and the whimpering aged mourning

as they killed us on their way of rendering relief ---

Kashmir, Gaza, Palestine, Israel, Ukraine and more

the world sits mute and dumb watching gruesome pageants

forming councils of power and congregations of chicanery

like vultures circulating in emptiness

waiting for carcasses and heaps of dead flesh

to feed upon in bleeding sunsets

merging with endless flows of riverine red

despite our sacramental ties now sacrificed

our shredded lives howling in butchery ---

And now they crush us beneath their wheels

with roaring guns and raging infernos

we still clamour and clamber for morsels of breath

till Death has become our Guardian of Life

in an endless Apocalypse ---

Laksmisree Banerjee is a multi-award-winning poet from India, based in her home city Kolkata and adopted city, Jamshedpur. She is a University Professor of English & Cultural Studies, and a Sr. Fulbright Scholar. Banerjeehas two International Lifetime Achievement Awards for Poetry, the UGC Postdoctoral Research Award for her work on Comparative Studies of World Women Poets, among several other awards, honours and fellowships. Widely published and anthologised, she has Twelve Books of Poetry and several Academic publications / /books with numerous International Assignments to her credit.