Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Hear me Please...

I don’t care about your name
Or what they call you by
I don’t care how you look
Two heads or four arms
Or a crown of thorns
With nails pinning your arms and feet
Or whether you sport a turban and a beard…
I just don’t care how you look
I just need you to be out there
Up there or anywhere
I need to know you’re keeping a watch
That you’re looking out
That you’ll take care of things
Not just me, but all of us..


Its not enough to know
That you’re within me
Or within everybody
I’m yet to learn to trust in me
And in the rest of us mortal creatures


I need you, YOU, YOU…
To have faith, to have trust
I need to know desperately
That I need not worry
That things will be fine
Even when they seem bleak


When I see things happen around me
Calamities and disasters
Floods, hurricanes, earthquakes
I’m struck with dread
I cannot understand why some suffer
I cannot fathom
Why I’m spared
I see no reason, no logic
in the stream of happenings
I’m sure you do
Just that its beyond my finite senses
So you see why I need you…


Sometimes its not enough
That I’ve been blessed
Becos when I see the lesser fortunate
It doesn’t help
Even as I’m grateful
Somewhere it niggles
Becos I see no difference
in me from them
And I know to You,
all are the same
in them I sense myself
and the ones I love
I can claim no redeeming trait
That isolates me from them…


After all they laugh the same laughter
They shed the same tears
They bear the same pain
But they suffered and they died!
And a piece of me died with them!


Such random selection
Breeds fear within
Today they, tomorrow who?I? Us?
How does the elimination happen?
This uncertainity haunts me…


As I beheld the wake of Nature’s fury
In all its raging splendor
The sights that met my eye
Staggered meI felt lost,
I knew not where to look
When I saw them look
out of their windows
In their marooned homes
The despair, the helplessness
Mirrored in their eyes
Reflected in their visage
Wrenched my soul
Suddenly, nothing mattered
It just is!
Good, bad, rich, poor
Right, wrong, no one cares
Its just you or me or them-
its just the same
the “why’s” just echoed
seeking an answer seemed pointless…


a sense of defeat, a sense of foreboding
a helplessness, a hopelessness
a bleak despair
a nameless fear
pervades my being


I want to shake off this murky stupor
I long to look around
Once again in amazed wonder
I need to reawaken Hope and faith yet again
That which has been
Shocked to numbness
I need to defrost
The spark, the zest for Life
For without faith and Hope
I’m just a breathing corpse!


So please tell me ...
You hear meHear me, please…
Can you hear my silent screams
For myself and the rest of us?
Tell me you do…


the above lines I scribbled in a wave of impulse just after having returned home from the Kaveri bridge- here, where we live- there had been floods in Nov- a husband left his wife and kids at a friend's home- at a safer area- but he remembered something important to be retrieved- and went back to get it...he never came back- his body was recovered after the waters receded...if only....many more such stories...our apartment was spared tho- becos a rly bridge served as a barricade...

the climate is already beginning to get warmer, and now it seems like the uncertainity of those days was just illusion...

3 comments:

divya said...

hi thanks for visiting my blog read your poem on memories its weird how we thought of the same thing guess we share a link...thats not all we share sunsigns too..but your poem was very pretty for one moment i was scared it wud bring tears to my eyes..tell me more bout yourself you can email me at divscorp@yahoo.com or leave me a message on my blog take care.

Vivek Sharma said...

another good one (how come I haven't read any of these yet).... though you can drop a few lines, a poet must pack more punch in lesser words, nahin?

Ardra said...

shall get back to you divya!

vivek! thank you...
and actually vivek, I do not sit down to write 'poems'- sometimes a thought/feeling overwhelms me-and seeks to be expressed - and in the urgency of this need,I just let the emotions spill over - it is usually an extension of my feelings- and I know not more...perhaps just that it is not prose...