Winter Anarchy
------------------
Finally the freezing morning
Is here again
With its big burden of bounties
Up for grabs—
The falling flakes from the firmament
The pretentious, the blithe, the deceptively silent
The ambitious little assailants from the ozone
It’s white, white, everywhere
Not a spot of grey.
Winter Anarchy - I
Come now the loathsome December
The pungent smelling quilts grow flamboyant
The spiteful crime of April night
Gets merrily effaced from public memory.
Water flirts miserably for acceptance
Windows slam with bangs all of a sudden
They loose their interest in the outside
The horizon squeezes within the miniscule walls.
Laziness rules rampant
with hearts narrowed and ears spoilt,
We keep listening to gossips of the woollens and quilts
Smoke, the fugituve, delivers incomprehensible sermons
Streams of foul-smelling saliva inundate everywhere.
We go on begging moments of servile warmth
Everybody willingly forgoes his right to protest
Indignity and exploitation--all accepted
We inhale, continue to live a few more moments.
These are the two poems I wrote at different points of time with a gap of 18 years, but when it came to choose a caption for the new one I just repeated it as I thought eighteen long years ago. As they say, styles change but to come back again: similar phenomenon also occurs in the poetic process. This is the maximum I can go to explain why I revert to the same idea again and again.
-------------------
Winter Anarchy -II
Finally the freezing morning
Is here again
With its big burden of bounties
Up for grabs—
The falling flakes from the firmament
The pretentious, the blithe, the deceptively silent
The ambitious little assailants from the ozone
It’s white, white, everywhere
Not a spot of grey.
It’s the new age
Begin all to speak the same language:
White is purity and black is bane
White is insight, black is taint
White brings compliance, black the defiance.
All of us, the wise homo sapiens
Love to see it white, perfectly unstained.
In the process
No matter if Ajanta is white-washed
No matter if white goes the murals
Ceding their space to wall putty
It’s all for the sake of purity
Everything now should look pure
Even white turns the human blood.
Gung-ho, the frigid air is now afire
Ending Kalyug, the age of black
No place is left
For myriad spectrums
Look yonder
Here comes the platinum
The pure white, as white as snow
The hard-hearted, the dangerously obstinate
The sombre, the sedate
As white as the widow’s clothes.
In this way
Ends, finally, the autumn phase
Gone are the heydays
Of the gold glittering
Golden is no glory now
Golden is garbage
All are on their last legs
Atop the bough, the yellow foliage.
Any moment from now on
Barbarian from the sky would launch invasion.
Amid the snow-white, in the new dispensation
The phalange of slayers will pound the pavement
Everybody should think white
Think alike or else face the venom.
Killed will be the weak, the children, the disabled
Deviating from white, the path dictated
The slavery shall reappear but glorified
With whip and disgust and torture
The blood whitened will leave no trace
The tears will freeze for a full compliance
It’s the zeitgeist, as white as snow
It's zeitgeist, as white as platinum.
------------
Begin all to speak the same language:
White is purity and black is bane
White is insight, black is taint
White brings compliance, black the defiance.
All of us, the wise homo sapiens
Love to see it white, perfectly unstained.
In the process
No matter if Ajanta is white-washed
No matter if white goes the murals
Ceding their space to wall putty
It’s all for the sake of purity
Everything now should look pure
Even white turns the human blood.
Gung-ho, the frigid air is now afire
Ending Kalyug, the age of black
No place is left
For myriad spectrums
Look yonder
Here comes the platinum
The pure white, as white as snow
The hard-hearted, the dangerously obstinate
The sombre, the sedate
As white as the widow’s clothes.
In this way
Ends, finally, the autumn phase
Gone are the heydays
Of the gold glittering
Golden is no glory now
Golden is garbage
All are on their last legs
Atop the bough, the yellow foliage.
Any moment from now on
Barbarian from the sky would launch invasion.
Amid the snow-white, in the new dispensation
The phalange of slayers will pound the pavement
Everybody should think white
Think alike or else face the venom.
Killed will be the weak, the children, the disabled
Deviating from white, the path dictated
The slavery shall reappear but glorified
With whip and disgust and torture
The blood whitened will leave no trace
The tears will freeze for a full compliance
It’s the zeitgeist, as white as snow
It's zeitgeist, as white as platinum.
------------
Shimla/ 19-12-2014
Winter Anarchy - I
Come now the loathsome December
The spiteful crime of April night
Gets merrily effaced from public memory.
Water flirts miserably for acceptance
Windows slam with bangs all of a sudden
They loose their interest in the outside
The horizon squeezes within the miniscule walls.
Laziness rules rampant
with hearts narrowed and ears spoilt,
We keep listening to gossips of the woollens and quilts
Smoke, the fugituve, delivers incomprehensible sermons
Streams of foul-smelling saliva inundate everywhere.
Everybody willingly forgoes his right to protest
Indignity and exploitation--all accepted
We inhale, continue to live a few more moments.
Port Blair / 04-12-1996
-------------------------
By
A N Nanda
Shimla
19-12-2014
------------------------
Labels: In Harness: my old poems, Muse
posted by The Unadorned | 7:50 PM
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