The Russian predator
by Ra Sh
Once again, there is blood on Neruda’s streets.
Once again, there are those sickening images
of mothers grieving for their sons,
of families looking for their bread winners,
of little girls picking blood splattered flowers,
of airplanes bombing housing colonies.
Once again, war photos will fill pages.
One will get the Pulitzer prize.
Many will get Russian gallantry awards.
The language of Dostoesky, Tolstoy,
Pushkin, Chekhov, Gorky and Bulgakov
will once again invade the poor language of Ukraine.
Once again, a nation of nation-less people
will be born.
A Russian predator is on the prowl.
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War Never Ends
by Moumita Alam
The war will end someday
but the smell of charred flesh of
Shmuel and Bruno* will hover over
the memories of their mothers.
And then the world will forget all.
We , humans, have very short memories
with everlasting greed.
The war may end tomorrow
and the leaders will dine around
the same round table.
Only a girl will stand with vacant eyes
holding the last kiss of her father
as the remembrance of the last warm
touch of love.
The war does not end ever.
Our today loses the warmth of yesterday.
Our tomorrows become apparitions of honking sirens.
Our birth is myth.
Our death is our invention.
Days, months pass by.
We remain same as Hitler or Putin
or Bush or that ruler of Gujarat.
A child* washes up on beach everyday.
Some drown in crossing borders.
A girl named Felani* is always found
hanging from the barbed wires.
Dementia is a healthy panacea.
History is a dead subject.
Humankind is the graveyard’s name.
About the poem:
Shmuel and Bruno are names of two kids from the movie The Boy in Striped Pajama which depicts the horrid acts of the Holocaust.
A child: This refers to the body of Alan Kurdi who was washed up while his family was trying to reach the west after being victim of war and conflict.
Felani : A fifteen years old girl was gunned down by BSF when she was trying to cross the Bangladesh border from India along with her parents.
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Ra Sh ( Ravi Shanker.N) is a poet and translator based in Palakkad, Kerala. He has published four collections of poetry, Architecture of Flesh (Poetrywala), Bullet Train and Other Loaded Poems (Hawakal), Kintsugi by Hadni (RLFPA) and In the Mirror, Our Graves, a chapbook with Ritamvara Bhattacharya. He has also published a play ‘Blind Men Write’ ( Rubric Publishing.)
He is also a translator whose English translations include Mother Forest (Women Unlimited), Waking is Another Dream (Navayana), Don’t Want Caste (Navayana), Kochiites (Greenex), How to Translate an Earthworm (Dhauli Books) and The Ichi Tree Monkey and new and selected stories of Bama (Speaking Tiger).
Moumita Alam
Moumita Alam is a bilingual (Bengali and English) poet, teacher and contributory writer for the mag People’s Review. Her poems have been published in The Bibliophilia Café, Freedom Review, Countercurrents, Litterrateur mag etc. She writes non-conformist poems that are vocal about the plight of the oppressed classes. Her solo collection in English ‘ The Musings of the Dark’ was published in 2020.
