HUNGER

Hunger:
Running naked, to the bakery shop
On the roadside, at the intersection,
Mom’s food is a distant dream,
And the money in the pocket is valueless.

Hunger:
Just not limited to
Beggars queued in front of the temple,
On near the traffic signal
It’s in the eyes of the child
Staring from the mother's shoulder cloth bag.

Hunger:
Was crossing road when the signal turned green-
Through the eyes of a corporate mother,
She had left home in the morning
A child's emotional cry
And in the solace of the baby-sitter.

Hunger:
It also reaches abroad
In the educated son's suitcase
This shop to that restaurant
Back like an empty pocket-
Grossly disappointed!

Hunger:
Laughs out loud,
Earth trembles, showing her big belly
Money, wealth, all these are worthless
Filling a hungry stomach
Is truly the glory of greatness.

Hunger:
Exists everywhere
Hidden, yet can be felt
Like the presence of an invisible enemy.
When hunger strikes
There’s no religion or race
No wrong or right
Hunger teaches man
What humanity is!

This poem was originally written by me in Odia (Oriya) and titled “BHOKA” and published in an online newspaper.

HUNGER DURING COVID-19

Hunger came,
Unnoticed, sneaking covertly.
Bigger than
The virus scare
Spreading its wings.
Injuring many lives,
Puncturing every segment of the livelihood
Preying on tender lives more often
Took away all the new possibilities along.

As they say, "Difficulty comes with kith and kin."
True to the proverb,
Came along cyclones and locusts.
Hunger is often accompanied by
Blasé towards the hungry and deprived
By the so-called elite mindset.
Whom neither the picture of the dead dog eater
Nor the dustbin digger, deterred.

Will a new day come?
When every heart will ache
For hunger attack
Every eye will open to the injustice
Every hand will reach out to the needy.
A hungerless new world will be smiling.

This poem is awaiting publication in an anthology titled “Unlocking Hopes”.

The Beggar

A sharp wind
makes me pull down my hat,
tighten my coat.
"Bloody freezing, innit."
He has no gloves.
His blue swollen fingers
barely close around the cup
which rattles in response
to the few coins I let drop.
"Thanks, mate."
He huddles a little deeper
into the recess by the bank’s
cash machine.

​"They should move them on.
Bring the neighbourhood down."
I turn. The owner of the complaint
is tall, blonde, sheep-skinned,
with tell-tale signs
of trying to stem the tide of aging.

I suddenly feel guilty by association.
Because I gave him so little?
Because I gave at all?
Because I smiled at her?

We Didn’t Know We Were Poor
​
Sometimes we went hungry, but not much. Mother made dandelion salad and stingy-
nettle soup. Potatoes and carrots in water with salt. Mother had been on the train again to visit farmer Ruttenberger. Left our last silver flatware with his wife. Brought back a big sack of rye. Can see her still, her too large dress, her apron, the coffee machine between her thighs, milling. Everyone was the same. You don’t notice if you have nothing to compare yourself to. My scary aunt with the deep voice and a wart on her chin would send us into the woods: ‘Don’t you go eating the blueberries now. Bring them home, you hear? I need them for jam making.’ There was a place near the brook, where the world smelled of woodruff and ceps, where bluebells announced our indelicate approach. Getting back empty-handed, round-eyed and honest-to-god we hadn’t found even one, my aunt wiped blue-purple stains from our guilty faces while winking at my mother. My uncle is looking for his cat with a darkening face. ‘I’ll find out who ate her!’

When I was Six

I remember the smell of
earth after summer rain,
the high grass hiding
me. It tickled, pinched
and stung. I followed
the activities of beetles,
caterpillars and assorted
small life.

Rolled myself packages of sorrel;
chewing them despite the acid
was the challenge.
Being hungry helped.

The lark slowly climbed
into blue. Became a small
black dot, trilling ecstatically.
My summer vision was framed
by green stalks of long grasses
and their seeds.

Standing on a milestone
I saw the fields covered
in shimmering heat, warping
invisible air. Cornflowers and
poppies between sandy-yellow
wheat. There would be a good

harvest. Yes, even then I knew
about harvests, watched the
sweating man and their flails.
Sometimes I’d take home
a pocket-full of grains.

Mother wiped my face,
hands, knees. My feet
permanently calloused.

The grains ground in the coffee mill
held firm between mother’s legs.
That last summer before
next May when strange men

​came in planes, tanks, and jeeps,
I watched André riding the brown back,
his face lit by the evening sun,
watched the oxen pulling carts,
watched the plow grooving
black furrows for the autumn
field, watched the swarms
of mosquitoes dance over the
stagnant pond and fell in love.

POT BELLY

Hope of an empty tomorrow sounds many roars through the weak walls of an ailing belly suffering from malnourished protrusion of that abandoned boy absorbing the jabs of starvation — walking barefooted in the deep valley of hunger while his lower jaw hangs low, yet uncertainty beckons nearer by the hour of the clock.

Ragged in his coat of many worries as he carries his funeral on his head, searching ultimately for where to dig a hole in the earth and hide his shame from the eyes of the day's light. For darkness hurls him along the track of misery with song sung in his mother tongue — perturbed by the dialect of strings of a heartbeat unable to hold the tension — of a frustrated voice.

Jumping over the fire he leaped above the pot belly bridging the gap between groans of not having and wishing for having bread from the baked loaves of food poisoning. Thirsty & weary: he tried drawing water from the dried well of tears — brimmed over with agony, yet he draws… emptiness instead: bucket full of nothingness, he counts 24 of his bare rib cage.

Labeling each as he feels the breath of hunger on his shoulder --
the stench of political corruption fouling his state of being --
violating his human rights
and seizing his smuggled pot of beans he made away
​with when the Watcher wasn't watching.