Is This What We Have Come to?

It’s raining black rivers from the skies tonight,
Incessant angry rivers of our sorrows,
We shiver, cold and wet like drowning rats,
In our warren holes, cracks, and burrows.

Is this what we have come to?
Then how far is it to perdition?

Around us the rhythmic Bollywood dancers,
Shake their legs; thrust their hips in motion,
We are like amorous dogs baying in the night,
For a touch of the idols we see on television.

Is this what we have come to?
Then how far is it to perdition?

Why do we live in constant, unfounded fears,
Of credit we have used, and loans unpaid,
To buy the follies that rot at home from disuse,
When Warren Buffet lives in a two-bedroom pad?

Is this what we have come to?
Then how far is it to perdition?

Have we broken our errant promises,
To our brothers who till the soil, grow grains,
Not to decimate forests and mine the hills,
So they don’t twist and turn nightly, for rains?

Is this what we have come to?
Then how far is it to perdition?

Instead we celebrate our borrowed money,
Indulging ring tones and crass downloads on the net,
Then we huddle and cry when the skies open up,
And nature weeps the black rain of regret.

Is this what we have come to?
Then how far is it to perdition?

The Platform

On the platform the hiss of steel,
Is like hiss of snake; the clang of wheels,
It’s the 8.30 a.m. local arriving,
And, the 8.31 a.m. local departing.

Travelers, their faces expectant,
Thoughts of home and contentment,
Faces staring at the far horizon,
For trains to arrive to their destination.

The announcer’s trained voice,
Impersonal in its insouciance,
There are voices humming,
Insistent shouts and hurried running.

Tired-, haggard-looking men,
And sweet-, spent-looking women,
They walk, shuffle legs, and shift,
Churning; regimented mass of three shifts.

The bhel-puri is tangy and sweet,
Mixed with the vendor’s own sweat,
Eat we must, spit, and drink,
Of civic sense, we must not think.

Births, this platform has seen,
Deaths, when the lights turn green,
As bogeys trundle in in the night,
There are many a curse and a fight.

There are aimless people here,
Embarking, disembarking to nowhere,
The weak lights cast shadows everywhere,
The neon light’s glow is so bizarre.

Some faces tragic, some faces sad,
Some are bored, some are mad,
Some long to rest their weary heads,
On the soft comfort of their beds.

The platform is now empty,
And, now, full of girls pretty,
Their talk and walk fills one with hope,
But, age has caught up, you dope.

The stoic platform in the early dawn,
Look, how it reposes in the sunny morn,
It bakes in the relentless heat of noon,
And, at night it sleeps in the glow of moon.

J

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I work very close to a railway station, in fact, I can stare right into a platform from my office. So, I have been working on this poem and hope it works for you.