Cease Fire
By the pond, by the river
On the beach, under the banyan,
Below lush foliage of a tree,
Or even just a few feet below the three coconut palms that merge in the sky
You do not meet poetry anywhere now.
By the back door of a deserted house
Blown up by a rocket
Our poems which reject war
Lie bloodied
Punctured by a sniper from an unidentified nest.
It would have been you and me, no?
Lying hand-in-hand, buried under the rubble of the house
Knocked down by the rocket which dodged the Iron Dome's gaze.
Photographers click away
At your hands and mine
Which have risen
From the pile of bricks
To demand a cease-fire.
Reformer
Poetry stands in queue
At the revolution square
Just like burning candles
At a protest meet.
They brand everyone a sham,
Those intellectuals who speak in assembly lines
Journalists jot down notes furiously line after line.
After long, very long-winded introductions
The protest march begins.
After submitting a representation at the police station
All the reformers fade into darkness, disappearing in line, one after another.
It has been a month since
The woman in whose name
The agitation was staged had died.
But no one seems to care anymore,
After putting her memory behind them
The reformers buy a pregnancy test-kit from a pharmacy at their wife’s request
And head home in the darkness, in line, one after another.
(These poems were originally written in Konkani by Pandurang Gaonkar, a journalist and poet based in Goa, and translated by Mayabhushan Nagvenkar)
