Poetry: Laksmisree Banerjee

Laksmisree Banerjee

EARTH DAY

I am Gaia, your Mother Earth

My greens golds, blues, pure chroma

Sustain your bewildered life

Your darkness throttles me

Your jigsaws pierce me 

Will you never end this strife?

I birthed you as you bloomed

I wrapped you in my lovelorn folds

You breathed in my watery placenta

You danced along my ripples

You lived cosily in my moulds

You ate, drank, slept, rose in songs

All in my silken wreathed sheath

In my shimmering grassy gold ---

You flew from azure to ether

Rejuvenated in my milk and water

Built your castles in airy space

All because I gave you home

And hearth to land here and stay ---

And now you ransack my plenitude

Ravage my gracious wealth and beatitude

Make my loving loam a wilderness

I am almost a weeping bald pate now

Shrivelled and withered living anyhow

Grown old well before my years

My ambrosia now a living hell

You make me limp with your Power-spell

Change before you hear your death knell

Every day is your Mother Earth Day

Preserve my bounty for you to live and stay!

***

GUNS IN GARDENS

Ah can you not hear the hoarse cries of 

the approaching torpedo?

The suppressed grunting of the angry thunder?

The incinerating rage of the lightning 

in blossoming gardens?

Can you not see the outstretched arms

of wailing green branches

Reaching out to the school-bagged, uniformed children

Walking side by side for their morning 

prayers in classrooms?

Those that you push into battle gear

with hazardous guns

Those that wallow in fury

of uncontrolled angst

You convert schools into war zones

splattered with soft cherry blood

Lobbies steeped in crime and greed

for arming children with guns of death

Rather than books of life?

O you creed of super-powerdom

May you become one of peace and love

To sustain the whiteness of your doves ---

Inhuman hate-clad hubris in loose strings

Spectral terror of the darkest purple clouds

Floating above in aimless dislocation

Rudderless un-reigned juvenile wrath

In the clutches of gun-totting monstrosity

In zones of misplaced machoism

From Texas to California

From Florida to New York

To usurped unloved reckless wrath

As forests and multihued rainbows weep

Shedding blood and tears in mutilation

In a land of unabated guns of annihilation

Shattering ceaselessly tender leaves

Of blooming buds in disarray

Nettled in thorny fogs of unwashed simplicity

Prodded in disenchantment to kill and shatter

Beauty of tumescent new lives ---

Ah the dissolved souls and fainted cries

The muted reverberations die across the ocean

As life becomes a toy of unbridled cruelty

Smothered forever in silence

In the precincts of innocence ---

***

DEAR MY FRIEND

Dear Friend ---

have you ever seen

those mushroom clouds

mirrored in the graphics

of moist eyes?

have you ever seen

blood splattered tomatoes

spilling, spouting in agony

gurgling out of 

puny wrenched bellies

of gunned down

erased innocence?

have you ever seen

those naïve moths deluded

in cavernous delight, dying

in their vain search for light?

have you ever seen

body-bags of unsuspecting bravery

flung out of hospitals and frontlines

thrown into riverine ashes?

have you ever seen

that dreary, desperate haze

of shattering shells

in bombed towns and villages?

have you ever seen

the musk rose wilted

torn and grounded

stamped dead under

the boots of cannon-cruelty?

have you ever seen

peoples, dogs, rats running

helter skelter

scrambling for life and shelter

in misty fields of smoking uranium 

alive still in death?

have you ever seen

that dying child gasping

in the lap of a dying mother

begging for life in the detritus

for the alms and arms

of some unknown god?

have you ever seen

a burnt body, a burnt mind

a scorched young soul

in the embrace of 

a wailing woman in wilderness?

No my dear friend

you have never seen these scenes

even in dreams ---

life has so eluded you

that you still breathe in masked sheen

in lounges, parlours, conditioned salons

drawing rooms of endless babble

and gibberish, glitzy gossip

as life passes you by covertly

with padded paws

as love leaves you forever in the lurch

and fervent humanity slips away

in all its scented miasma

through the ornate hour glass

in evasion and treachery

in the gaudy darkness you chose

till the last explosion!

***

---

Setu, June 2023