Dharma Sansad

Sansad was real,
dharma was an alibi.
We moved away carrying hatred home
just like mother cats carry their kittens.

God was killed there
when the speakers with saint-like looks
spewed venom from their ghostlike souls.
Can God reside
where hate reigns?

Those moth-eaten airs
were the rancid breeze
flowing from another world,
hiding today in yesterday.
So that tomorrow can
be buried in today
in the sharp teeth of
unproved belief.

Stammer

The rendezvous my words have
these days
is with the death, dead and dying.
Once they met during
spring, fall, rainbow and sunrise.

Gods have become
the vanishing Saraswati,
lost in the sand of prejudice.
But they don’t wait to surface
lest they face pitch darkness of belief.

The gulf between the word and the deeds,
is it a stammer or lameness?
But it has become the lingua franca
of people intoxicated, enticed and enthralled.
They can no longer escape
the sharp tooth of existence.
It is no longer a metaphor.

Witnessing Cataclysm

Images stumble,
smiles limp,
voices are drowned,
light has faded.
We are born unto disgrace.

If you sleep among convicts,
you can’t wake among angels.
Chasing your God is fine
until you start chasing out others.
Then edification and death are the same.

Languages of storm don’t
make people Jehovah.
Speeches of prophets
don’t lead people to redemption.
There could be flowers but no fragrance in the end.

Doubts dubbed as philistines
when unalloyed devotion was being asked for,
but they didn’t know others
when they are called the shadowed ones.
As a witness, I am drinking
only poison now.

Unknowing

They descended the hill
like a flock of white sheep.
They didn’t look like snow melting
but resolute like the sheepish dogmas
they harboured in confidence.

Did they know themselves?
Did they know what they were up to
while sanctioning food,
lynching men and stopping love from taking root?

Can you know yourself
if you are in thrall of “I”?
How can they know others
when they are called “them”?
Their journey ends at the door of silence,
inside they have no idea.

The World Is Turning Blind

A man died saying
“an eye for an eye
makes the whole world blind.”

Can revenge turn the wheels back,
wind down the history
as if all is even?

No way will it be even,
past can’t be steamrolled today,
nor can yesterday be hidden in tomorrow.

The stench of the past seduces your nose
with the overpowering taste of having no other.
The brain has become a tongue, flickering and devouring.

People lived and died
by the light of that day
but with the light we received
we have gone blind.

Excerpted with permission from Harvesting Gods: Poems, Satya Mohanty, Speaking Tiger Books.