Sunil Sharma




Cry of a wounded mother

What have you done, my children of various colours, races, creeds and regions?

You have not spared your first mother? Primeval mother that sustains civilizations across time-space continuum.  A mother that sustains your own biological mothers, fathers, families? Ungrateful lot! You have destroyed the mother earth, individually and collectively, via your acts of vandalism

amounting to slow murder?

Your greed for more profits ruined my face. You killed the soil with chemicals and pesticides for better yields. Razed mountains and hills for sand and other building materials for swanky homes. Poisoned the rivers and oceans, choking the aquatic life to death there. Massacred rain-forests that loosened the top soils and activated floods.

Your vehicles and home alliances filled the skies with toxic air.

Any act of ignorance would have been forgiven by me, the most tolerant mother but you all knew and never cared for the consequences of

wanton destruction in the name of progress

Now the gods have fled from the forests, rivers, mountains, dales and rivers.

They are angry with the ungrateful mortals.

The divine wrath will be visiting too soon.

Again. And again.

Convulsions. Putrid air.

Grey vaults. Fires.

There will be more floods and famines.

Oceans will warm up.

No winter in winters

No summer in summers.

There will be snow in the desert

Desert in the snow!

And very little water.

Only yellow haze across the planet

And high or freezing temperatures.








Search

Above the clusters of towers

a bird soars through the smog,

desperately searching for a tree

that once was her home

but bulldozed last night by a greedy

bungalow-owner for light and vertical growth

in a dense Delhi neighborhood.










Roar

The summer drains

choked with debris

assume the riverine form

in the monsoon

and

floods the areas 

with fury---at being

abused

by the citizens.


Sunil Sharma