Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
~ W.B Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’
One day, your borders shall speak;
Indignant birds will shit on your head.
Your centre will give way,
It cannot hold its own dying skull
In place; your dreams of fire are rusting.
Your house is full of stench.
You took lives to adorn maps;
You slit tongues that did not parrot
Your hymns; you let loose a boomerang
Without knowing how to receive it;
Now face your own weapon.
You, reading your epic the wrong way,
Thought Krishna is your saviour.
War’s wily charioteer, Krishna destroyed
The Kurus and his own clan˟ for nothing;
If the enemy you kill is nothing,
Time, old ninja, will replace your head
With an elephant’s; punish your memory.
One day, anarchy will come barefoot;
Blast the ceremony of crime.
How long can a lie last in history?
Your wise men will ponder such questions,
While a new beast of amnesia is born.
˟ Krishna, the charioteer of the warrior Arjuna in the epic The Mahabharata, said war is a moral duty, and gave the logic that both the killer and the killed are illusions in the hands of time.
