A poem with a universality by Mamta. From coffee that two people have to the terror attacks in another continent, depicting the life and times of the now generation.
A round of coffee, baked delights and dimples
Celebrating youth
On a vacation high
Noisy clatter of cutlery and crockery
Heady chatter with eloquent dreams
The electric charge
Tickling the bond between friends
Laughing and shaking
In mirthful abandon
Caught unawares
Their tender bodies
Fertile minds
Feisty spirits
Silenced by bullets
Still lingering on foaming cappuccino
Blood and flesh
Of innocence and terror
Mingled in pouring rain
Sealed in tiny caskets
Their eloquent souls riddled with questions
The serrated world has no answers.
In another Continent
Like leitmotif
A Truck rams
Turning Bastille celebration into funerary moments
Footprints of terror running amok
Every sunrise torn by violence
Every sunset soaked in gore
A spasming gloom
Rendering survivours mute and quivering
The world has a new metaphors
Brutal and harsh
The machine guns, ballistic humans
Rape and plunder
Till the litany of violence
Becomes the pied piper of souls
As a child watches
A pinwheel whirling in the breeze
Her mother drinking in his joy with her gaze
His father holding him close
That moment is scary
It’s tender and soft
It doesn’t belong to this world
The child
Ends up
With a body like a sieve
His mother and father
Buried in the stampede
The bright pinwheel damp
Crimson with his blood
No longer flutters.
©Mamta Joshi
Pix from Net.
Mamta Joshi did her post graduation in History from University of Allahabad. She writes short stories, reflective essays, prose pieces on everyday life in national dailies and international e-magazines. She writes with equal ease in Hindi. For over two decades, as a teacher of English in college section at SMC, Allahabad, she has been interacting with young minds, understanding their pulse and in turn being savvy on technology, fitness, fashion, humour and rumour too.
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