I Am a Death Statue!!!

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:

1. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee: Anandmath (Novel) 
2. 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) 
3. 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. 
4. 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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Highway Heroes

by R.K. Brojen

When I open my eyes
with the morning newspaper headlines
blockades cutting the national highways.
For every blockade shouts
in the name of democratic voice and non-violence
the common man in valleys and hills starve.
The Government agents of essential commodities
enjoy their democratic rights and freedom
in fixing the new prices of the commodities and
the common man become victims of everything.

For every blockade on NH-39 Ministers remember NH-53
They investigate the highway conditions
in assembly debates
and have been repairing it
since for a long time on Assembly tables
and in local newspapers.

Tomba, my friend from Mayang Imphal
the truck driver in the national highways does not believe in
the modified fortune forecast made by our local astrologer
after getting money
from his parents.
But he is real devotee of God
for unknown unforeseeable events he could encounter
on his highway journeys.
He is very simple
but clever enough to face undirected tax bullets
and is well experienced in bargaining
at each named and unnamed check posts. However,
the whistle of the tax takers are not meeting at a point
with the horns of the paying drivers.

He never afraid of gambling his life with the landslides
which does not have a fixed time and place stamped on them.
and take all liberty whenever they fall.
He has detailed accounts of damages
of the road where his life is at risk.
He has all the names of hotels and vendors
on both sides of the way ahead.
He knows where to stay where to hide
and where to run.

The missing stones on the roads
don’t have names or numbers on them
But can be found on the walls
of the leaders’ homes or in their bank accounts
in different places of the world.
But my friend volunteers and donates
money to repair the missing stones
on the roads.

On the way
the heat of the mid-day sun reminds him
of the fire that broke out in the forests
along the boundary of hills and valleys
that seems separating the two
but connected forever. But who lit the fire
that’s the only question which matters.
He saw and felt the raining clouds never have the bias
to all thirsty dry seeds waiting to sprout and
to the burning fires. But
Where is the wind blowing from
That’s the only t question that matters.
So he used to sing
in the dark side of every nights lighting
the dark ways of long highway with his truck's head lights.
But his songs are not loud enough
to break the silence of hills and valleys

it does not have the taste of ethnic civilization
the tune is not connected to the blockade cries
words free from all narrow minded hearts.
His songs are very popular in hotels
and vendors pan and grocery shops
among the common people
irrespective of hills or valleys.
But when his journey stops
the artificial starvation prevails the common man starves.

The truck drivers are real life heroes
On the national highways.

Dreamland

by R.K. Brojen

In the land of dreamers
death men and women are walking
counting the days of the wars
to find their new days of a new
world. They have straight faces
and walk straight finding their own ways.
They look at each other straight.
They think straight.
They speak straight.
But they are death statues
walking on the ways of complicated darkness.
Within the colourless rays of the selfish
Sun they don’t know their own colour.

If somebody stabs them they don’t feel the pain
because it has been habituated to them. They don’t even know
the colour of their own blood. (Don’t say they are dead, they will get angry. )
They don’t realize the difference between life and death.
The sky covering them is meaningless.
Beneath them they lost their own footprints on their ways
could not be seen and followed them by the others.
For every new battles
the wombs of the experienced mothers
are the training centres of the unborn soldiers.
But the wombs usually burst into pieces
by the kicks of the babies inside.
So, the soldiers die unborn
in the Gynae wards of the hospitals.
The death bodies of the soldiers
will be found scattered and un-cremated
in the morgues of the hospitals
or fields or bushes or mountains.
The mothers die on the beds
or roads or markets
before they see their babies born.
The death mothers wake up
it the middle of the darkened night
and running all the ways possible
holding the burning bamboo lamp
following the falling stars from the sky.
Looking at the death faces of the stars
she is asking about her lost babies
that she has never seen.
Then they stitch their own wombs to give birth
those soldiers again. In the land of dreamers
life and death have the same meaning and same story.