“We have been made to be heroes for a while – but I know ultimately that will not change our condition.”
Wakeel Hassan*
We celebrate our heroes
As we possess our daily newspapers:
Today is on the dining table
Tomorrow is in the trash.
Heroic feats of the common masses
are the capital
of the corporate giants
They sell it
They kill it.
The heroes die unnamed in the shanties.
Our memory is shorter than our endless tragedies.
Wakeel Hassan – a rat hole miner who was in the group that rescued 41 trapped workers in Uttarakhand.
Moumita Alam is a poet from West Bengal. Her poetry collection, The Musings of the Dark was published in 2020. The book has about a hundred poems written in protest against the humanitarian crisis from the abrogation of article 370, the Delhi riots, and the Shaheen Bagh movement to the unbearable sufferings of the migrant labourers due to the unplanned COVID-induced lockdown. Her second poetry collection, Poems At Daybreak is going to be published soon by Red River Publications.
