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.
