Saturday 1 August 2020

Indrani Saha, Poetry 2020 Longlist

Hate

I trudged along life spewed with curses and hate,
“What? Use are your stupid love songs?” they said,
Love is a lie, an abstract concept,
While hate has defied the bounds of its abstractness
And is a palpable force of immense strength,
It holds the record of displacing people and moving mountains.

Their hate wouldn’t let me live,
It choked me till it was hard to breathe,
I tried to build a world for a parallel existence,
My mind inspired by its trysts with intolerance,
How to build a world, you ask?
Well, it’s an awfully easy task:
Infest it with small, gullible creatures,
With even narrower and smaller minds
That breed intolerance disproportionate of its perimeters,

Selfishness and lust brewing in their flesh’s binds;
Sprinkle doubt and create contrasting
Skin colors, religions and faith,
Invest a few with the power to twist all meaning
And bend the oceans towards hate,
Carve out cannonballs and weapons,
And Godmen doubling as demons,
Build monuments of oppression and graveyards of fear,
Invent avant garde techniques of torture,
Add multitudes of outcasts, immigrants and broken
Moved by ideologies of dictators outspoken,
Give them toys, give them machinery,
Ammunition to destroy each other to establish supremacy,
Watch them paint blue skies over with grey smoke
Till their visions cloud over and their lungs choke,
Smother innocents to death till you can no further,
Be a God with a taste for macabre and murder,
The prime ingredient for creating a world is hate,
I realised everyone was right when they said,
Love is a lie and love songs are dead,
The world bleeds black and thrives on hate.

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