Divide Artificial – “One-Liner Wednesday”

This post is in response to Linda’s  #1OneLinerWednesday.

As I was walking my dog Skooby today morning, a few lines of a poem was churning in my head.  Normally I will sit down at my PC or jot down in my mobile whenever such things happen but I did not have recourse to any one of those today.  Can’t rely on old memory too much now a days. By the time I sat on my PC, what remained is just one line of the poem. So before I forget, here is to One Liner Wednesday

Race is the cement,
color of skin sand,
language aggregates,
concrete to nationality steel,
building the dividing wall of religion
keeping us apart
while the river of love
from time immemorial
flows with the color of blood,
RED.

I Search in Vain

My friend Jane (Jane Dougherty) had introduced me to writing Ghazals in English some time back.  Growing up in India, I was quite familiar to listening to ghazals but never knew that ghazals were also written in English.  During last few months, I tried my hand writing a few pieces. I either write in my mother tongue, Assamese ( Axomiya), and then translate to English or vice versa.  Last week, like a fool, I prompted Jane to write a ghazal as she had not posted a ghazal for quite some time.  She turned the table on me as she promptly wrote one and posted (Rain) and challenged me to write one. I find it very hard to follow rules while writing poetry and ghazals do have some strict rules.  I am not professing that I have followed all the rules but here is my try.  My apologies to all the purist who follow strict rules. I plead guilty to breaking the rules.

I wrote the following piece in English first and then translated to Assamese. Posting it in the same sequence.

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I Search in Vain

Just wanted to be human but society pigeonholes

Hyphenated identity breaks my heart as society pigeonholes

Non-believer

I believe in the goodness of humanity
Believe that dawn will follow night surely
Believe in all things beautiful
Though the world is full of misery
Believe in  oneness of mankind, disappearance
Of artificial boundaries dividing us
Believe one day we shall overcome, and
Win our fight against eradication of crippling diseases
Believe we will be able to stop all abuses and exploitation
And rise above our shortsighted, mean spirited oppressors
I believe that peace will prevail over terror
Truth will always trump fake
Those who preach hatred
Will be consumed by their own hatred
But I do also believe that we the people
Of diverse faith, color and race
Working together will create wonder
To make this world better
Because I am not ready to wait
For grace of almighty
And believe in miracles to happen
You shun me as a non-believer
I will rather have my faith
In the goodness of humanity
And burn in hell if need be

“WRONG”! Week Twenty Eight of My Fifty Two Weeks Journey with the Letter ” W”

We come to this world pure and innocent.  Slowly as we start growing up, we start to learn what is right and what is wrong.  It is out of love and concern about our safety that our elders, knowingly or unknowingly, start teaching us what is good for us and what is bad. We do not have much choice. Left to ourselves we would have learnt everything by trial and error as we grew older, if we would have been lucky enough to survive our curiosity.  So early on in our life, we learn to be subservient to our elders in believing what is right and what is wrong.

Many of us during our adulthood relearn to judge for ourselves what is right and what is wrong. Sadly, many of us never grow up.  We abdicate our responsibilities to judge for ourselves and become blind followers.  We rent out our brains to others to play with it as they like and become puppets, to dance at the will of our puppet masters as they pull our strings.  Simply put, we just become unable to decipher right from wrong.  We let ourselves be manipulated and start believing whatever our puppet masters put into our brains.  Otherwise how can one justify killing for any cause. We have sanctified killings and tortures by awarding Nobel Peace Prize to people whose hands were sullied by the blood of  their fellow human beings, we have declared people as saints who had tortured their fellow human beings in the name of their faith and God.  We always find a reason to justify those actions of ours.  If those killings and tortures can be right, then why other killings and tortures are wrong.

For me, personally, what is wrong is wrong.  We may try to wash that wrong in milk to make it look like pure lily white, but that does not make it right. Concoction of politics and religion, the venomous brew of race, ethnicity, language and nationality has poisoned our minds to such an extent that a day may soon come when the human race, whatever left of it,  may be dancing the dance of ultimate destruction on the cemetery of it’s own creation.

Before I start sounding like one of those sermonizing pundits who invade our houses day and night through the wonders of modern technology at light speed, let me share with you the starting word of the poem for week twenty eight of my fifty two weeks journey with the letter “W”.  You, my dear readers, must have guessed it by now and you are not “WRONG”.

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This post is in response to Write Anything Wednesday-Aug-010-2016 sponsored by Writerish Ramblings