by R.K. Brojen Singh
Hey! white pigeon!!
Where are you flying?
Your wings are all burned
By the violet flames from my home
How long can you fly?
In this land of chaotic violence I know you are an angel
Shouting in a series of nightmares here
Standing on the death skeletons.
Look pigeon! Once I thought
When I see I in myself here
Who was killed thousand times by myself
The person who suicide is not a damn coward anymore
But still I am trying to be brave
When the contenders defy their originalities
When the commander do not listen to his troopers
When the leaders forget their promises
When the life has been bargained with gun
When I see the mothers stripe their body naked
For their death children
When I see the red streets, the red people, the red events
Still I am trying to be brave
But I will not suicide today.
Pigeon, I am here in the protest rally!!!!
Pigeon! You have seen
When Bankimchandra portrayed saints
Singing Vande mataram against the Gora
Bhikaji painted it on Indian National Flag in Stuttgart
Bhagat broke up the colonial walls in Irwin’s heart in Lahore jail;
Few decades back you watched
Cam, Dat, Quan and Dan in Vietnam prison
Breaking the imprisoned life’s lock
With their bombs of poems;
You still see Wai
Who has been writing his poems
On the dictating walls of Burmese jail;
One went off
For some defined uncontrolled pains of human torture;
One comes back
For another undefined and unacceptable rules and law
Defined in different time and place;
Human gives birth evils in their heart
And born another to rescue from it.
So you came here for some reason;
Look, you can’t fly any longer
With your burned wings
Your eternity of roaming this part of the globe
Becomes nightmare;
You are too tired!!!!
No pigeon, no!!!
Don’t get tired to fly across the globe
There are many things you have to understand my home.
In this small pretty heaven
Peasants are starving in the days of harvest
Workers become slaves with their empty hands
Street protests become meaningless to the protestors and violent
Academicians become tired to teach in human rights schools
Freedom of guns and bullets threaten daily peace
The benefactors become blood suckers
The politicians become businessman
The people become commodities;
So the cows, horses, elephants become carnivorous
The dogs are barking in days and nights
The wise cats are roaming in and out
The poisonous snakes are coming out from the bushes
Mother pebets, mother rate go mad in their bid to save their offspring;
Therefore
Red water flows in the rivers
The flowers in the garden have forgotten the meaning of Spring
The trees in the forest are not free from darkness
The mountains and valleys are dumb spectators
The colour of the sky turned to black or brown or red
The black smoke and red blood are painting
My home’s picture in local newspapers
The innocent statues are coming out from the painted house
And die on the crowded streets, markets,
Community centers, hospitals;
They don’t have historical monuments
I could not find their heavenly stories In this small heaven.
No pigeon, no!!!
Don’t fly across the globe to tell this I am ashamed
These tears and anger are for my home And for me
Let it dry here.
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References:
- Bankim Chandra Chatterjee: Anandmath (Novel)
- Bhikaiji Cama (1861-1936), She painted Vande Mataram in three coloured Indian national flag in International Socialist Conference in Stuttgart in 1907, Germany. (Everybody knows Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, Shukhdev in Indian freedom struggle)
- Hoang Cam, Le Dat, Phung Quan and Tran Dan were part of a movement which criticised life under communism but which was crushed in the late 1950s. The four, two of whom are now dead, published their work (poems) in two magazines. Vietnamese government has announced that it is to award a prestigious prize to four poets - 50 years after they were imprisoned and their works banned.
- Burmese Poet Gets Two Years in Prison for Eight-Line Poem by Staff Daily News, Online Only, posted 11.12.08: The Burmese poet Saw Wai was sentenced on Monday to two years in prison for writing a love poem that contains a hidden criticism of the Burmese dictator General Than Shwe. The eight-line poem, “14th February,” was published in a weekly magazine in January. When read vertically, the first word of each line forms a description of General Than Shwe as crazy with power. Saw Wai was consequently charged with “harming public tranquility,” according to the Times in London.
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