Trayvon Martin


By Badri Raina
badri.raina@gmail.com

You forgot your Biblical lessons,
Dear boy; God being Light, all
Good things are white;
And Satan being the prince
Of darkness, being born black
Is a hopeless mess.
Against such black vicissitudes
Was a just law found that said
To the white killer, “stand your ground.”
Only some sixty million of your forefathers
Were  murdered in the slave trade;
Too many more are still left
To be made dead. Sinners are those
That think racism is bad.
Only when non-white trash gathers
Into a common cause is racism racism;
Zimmerman is merely God’s own prism.
From the Fuhrer he remembered how
The Swastika was not racist emblem,
But Zarathustra’s  declaration
That only a chosen some
Had right over life, death, and the fun
Born of  extermination; thus
Zimmerman was only furthering
The  pure Aryan nation.
Watch Obama hold his thinking head,
Wondering how to balance
The claims of white power with
The  piquant tragedy of the dead.
Statecraft is a matter of great
Consideration of how to do
The bidding of the endowed
Without seeming to do so.
Dear Martin that art now in the
Netherworld, from the Netherworld
Itself must issue forth a new light
That bids adieu to the jaundiced ray
That makes difference between
Zimmerman and you, and bears
Promise to make mankind
All of one hue.

Comments

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