Title: When sympathy breathed its last
Author: Krishna Prasai
From.his book Absence of the Sun
The pages of newspapers have been accustomed
To make the news of bloodshed easy every day,
How cheap has death been!
How insensitive has sympathy become!
It cannot search itself when it's lost,
It cannot cry itself in its own funeral.
• • • •
When the hands accustomed to wield the sickle
Began to shoulder the garland of guns
These days every single morning
Rises itself by giving birth to thousands of martyrs,
And develops itself into midday
Among widowed mothers
To set as the twilight with vermillion wiped off.
How easy the funeral could become,
How strange the martyrdom could become
In the place where your navel pipe was buried
And the man enjoying his untimely death.
• • • •
My dear daughter Yakisa,
I may consider you unintelligent,
But you still have some sensitivity left,
When you see the land filled with blood.
In the heaps of dead bodies
Within the pools of blood
The human conscience hasn't yet got wet
As much as you are drenched when your dolls are broken.
Your joy which a chocolate can buy
Is lost in the clouds created by gunpowder
And as a parade of bullets is going on
We don't know when would it be orphaned.
We are unable to think
Nor to consider
What kind of death has stung, we don't know
And who at that moment
Will be an unclaimed martyr.
• • • •
All around there is but silence and quiet,
Everyone thoughtless, with no knowledge,
Settlements almost dead
Intoxicated with blood.
This is the time when the Buddha has cried,
Even if wanted
There is no one to carry the dead bodies on their shoulders,
There is no one to express sorrow.
This moment when conscience has committed suicide,
Hey my relatives!
Hey my seniors!
Hey my kith and kin!
Don't at all walk by the way of my residence,
Sensitivity has died right now,
I cannot recognize anybody at all
Translated into English by Dr. Tara Nath Sharma
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