Hunger

Certainly, it’s everywhere, right? All over the world?
Yes, someway or the other. I read a report about it. I saw it in the street today. 
Oh! I met it last year while travelling. I saw the eyes filled with it.
I watched a documentary last week. Does it quench? It depends on gnawing a hundred holes.
Was it in the past? Yes, of course. Though things were different, so what?
Though you distance yourself, you ignore it, you overlook it, you avoid it somehow.
Yet, it remains at the corner of your heart, in the prick of your heart, in your searching eyes, in the crevices of your brain.
Reflected in anger, frustration, impatience, shrieks, stress, sentences, sights, rights.
Sometimes in silence, sometimes out of sight. Condemned to live by comrades of dying.
At times it becomes unpronounceable.
What else?
Suppose we are able to measure it, then what?
Escaped to be entrapped. In any case, shot in war.
Faces, could you recognise any?
Carrying continuously, from here to there. Keep a low-pressure area on the surface life.
Can it be divided?
Licking the pavements, swallowing the insults, digesting the injustices, biting the bitten heart.
Leaving nothing for the vulture, nothing to be eaten, except plastic.
On the other hand, the world goes by and we move on.

Published in The Poetry Lighthouse.

This road

This road buried the living hunger.
This road has the tyrannical sucking blood of the native
This road was filled with carcasses.
This road heard her pleading cries.
This road carries the waft of murder.
This road had the track of musk deer.
This road has a different grammar, different character, different syntax, and different poetry.
Sleep wanted to dive into those innocent, hungry eyes; they 
Can bite this cinder of hungry 
Hunger that remained long in her dying eyes
Paid more than the borrowed sum
Face covered with ashen policies and plans
The turn of the road is where their houses conjoined the dancing flames.
Here the white vultures feasted on the sweat and toil of deer.
Here once the old lions tore the flesh of the souls.
Here their hands designed the structure after structure.
Here they divided them into parties, sects, ideologies, beliefs, and preached pieces.
The ditch is where they learned to say yes.
Oh! Hunger, have some patience; they will be exiled soon.

Crying

I heard the familiar cry calling
Sound is similar in Asia, Africa, Australia
Gaza, Nigeria, Russia, Ukraine, ……
I wanted to write A for apple, but what it’s H
For hunger
That familiar crying child disturbs me
Day and night
That orphan on the railway station
Circling his dead, starved mother
To wake up
Though she has left some
Hunger for him to feed on

Click to hear the poet read the poem.