Dear Gunter


Badri Raina

Dear  Gunter,
look what you have done now—
gone for the golden horns
of the holy cow.
Your this blasphemous tantrum
hollows out all that you gathered
in that  soulful  tin drum.
And why now at eighty four,
when , O Grass, only  a wisp of
time’s  last hay lies before
you? 
Is it that passion for the truth
or mere prejudice
that  makes you  say this?
And even if it be the first,
who will believe that it is not the last?
The Zionist church is aghast
that you may or may not remember
the sixty million who were lost
to slave trade (just read thou Zinn),
but that you should so underrate
the celebrated holocaust.
Or those others who were burnt
to cinders at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
or in the orange killing fields of Vietnam,
or annihilated in Iraq or Afghanistan,
Gaza or Romolla,
or in the millions in Latin America
and  dark Africa, and  Indonesia,
do all those now qualify to the same
status as victim as Mordecai or Ephraigm?
Could your frame of historical reference
ever be more wonky, O foolhardy dunce?
All this goes to show how little noble
is the Nobel; and how the world’s knowledgeable
god’s chosen children fail.

Comments

M.L. Raina said…
Doesn't Germany have a tradition of antisemitism dating back to Prussian empire? Think of the novelist Ernest. Junger who wrote a novel called the marble cliffs about the first World war and excoriated Jews and other non-aryan races. Or the French dramatist/poet Paul Claudel. Or the jackboots of Charles Maurra 's action francaise. And yet I would go with Auden and pardon them all for'writing well'. I would look at Gunter in that spirit.I remain

Your congenital contrarian.
MLR
April 14, 2012 at 7:44 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Remembering Maninder Singh Kang

Image
(18.5.1963-4.2.2013) By Rajesh Sharma I visualize him watching his own burning corpse and laughing a philosopher’s laughter. “Oye pandatā , this Kang was a dog’s tail of a man. Look, he is poking even the flames to laugh. What a struggle the wind and the fire are waging over his body. And look at the rain, it refuses to stop. His death seems to have released an excess of the five bhoots , making nature go berserk.”                 Listening to him, I try to make sense of his bizarre inner geography.                 “He’ll be impossible to replace. It’s such a loss,” he adds in an altogether different mood.       Maninder had this ability to move effortlessly between gaiety and gravity. He probably had found the thread that connects the extremes.        ...
Read more

Remembering my teacher

By Rajesh Kumar Sharma A friend, who also is a teacher, recently sent an sms: satinder singh passed away this morning . Satinder Singh introduced me to the art of reading literature. He taught us to read patiently, to wait like birds even as reading hatched taking its own time. And he taught us to navigate literary works like wayfarers exploring the labyrinthine patterns of some Persian carpets. I remember the day -it must have been in 1980- I first went up to Satinder Singh. As always, he was there outside the classroom well before the class began. I had been reading a poem by Tennyson and had some questions. He heard me out and asked me to see him again the following day. 'Read this book over the weekend and come back to me,' he said, handing me The Complete Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson . I looked apprehensively at the forbidding tome but he reassured me, 'You'll read it through, I know.' And he smiled, patted my shoulder and walked into the class. ...
Read more

You don't know (A poem by Pash)

  Translated from Punjabi by Rajesh Sharma you don ’ t know how I ’ m counted in poetry: like some carcass-eating dog that has strayed into a full-blown mujra   perhaps you wonder what I write late into the nights in the light of a lamp for some party engaged in dangerous things   you don ’ t know how I go to poetry: like a rustic woman in new clothes of outworn fashion who steps, bewildered, into city shops   I ask of poetry nail polish for you coloured embroidery thread for my younger sister bitter medicine to treat father ’ s cataract   poetry sees mischief in such demands   every month night after night it sends for me its sentinels carrying batons of cane and guns with polished butts they take away my beloved books my childhood picture from the shelf and my first love ’ s cry that slipped on the stairs and, hurt, was broken into a disconsolate rainbow   you don ’ t know...
Read more