Satish Verma, 21 april 2016
I was not capable of
contradicting the quietness.
A silent emotion was insulting me.
Forgetting the self-denial
I went for choosing the impossible.
Am I sick of myself?
The agony overwhelms me with mystic relief.
Here and now I feel the human spirit
outsmarting the gifts of revenge
in the eyes of past.
No hope of breeze. It is hot inside,
the spirit burning. False peers
were scoring with debts of darkness.
Tiny ideas crowd the mind
flying straight through the mist of anguish
I elect to be nothing.
Gert Strydom, 20 april 2016
I walk in the veldt near to Majuba hill
where once farmers in battle stood
and the morning wind has a chill to it
where a bullet hit a British general true and good
and all that I feel is the lost,
the lost without measure and the severe cost
that British forces made women and children pay
and here at this outpost,
not even at the sight of the greatest victory
can I find any peace in me,
even if I fired that selfsame gun
that killed major general George Pomeroy
or drilled a hole right through
1st EarlHoratio Herbert Kitchener
it would not take away the killing, the homicide
that the British brought
and the terror, the injustice,
the inhumanity will never be gone.
[Poet’s note: This poem is written in remembrance of the twenty thousand (some figures are as high as thirty five thousand) innocent white Afrikaner women and children that died in British concentration camps, after their farms were scorched by the British in the Anglo-Boer war in South Africa, which includes a great grandmother of mine. For a clear picture of these atrocities read my epic poem “Through the eyes of a field coronet” which is based on the eyewitness account of field coronet JJ Potgieter.]
Satish Verma, 20 april 2016
I will ask you no more.
An answer settles the question.
Let myriad questions remain in air.
Thirst is larger than the river.
Silence! Ghosts are walking.
You can hear footfalls of time,
past is peeping from the windows.
Dyslexic kids are not able to decipher,
the code of gifts, the sweet tongue.
Powerless hands are tied behind the back
and neck is broken with precision.
The rape of fragrance,
petals are curling up to storm,
flying homeless in sky without speech,
ceaselessly searching instead–ness.
Half-burnt bodies for feast, roasted dreams
for taste.
But for fire, a single tear drop
frozen on the cheeks of mercy.
Gert Strydom, 19 april 2016
Vain are the words and deeds that are mine
when they are not inline with Thine
and in this life when things go really bad,
when little by little my faith does decline
You are the omnipresent Deity
that does daily dwell with me,
who with selfless love brings me back
to answers that I did not see
and although it feels as if I am on my own
You do never leave me alone
and when all people do me forsake
You are still my friend, the only one
and although I daily struggle to survive
You do continually bring sense to my life.
Satish Verma, 19 april 2016
A useless space between the sentences,
ghastly story does not end in black and white.
Again the heart cries.
I keep on knocking on the doors
and then return to blackness.
Sometimes people become insects.
Cockroaches, ants and spiders,
weaving their webs and hills,
crawling, creeping, clawing.
Flesh eaters. Pouncing upon hapless victims.
Depression. I am devastated.
Something churns in breast, dousing the spirit, lines and words.
Cannot sit quiet. Agoraphobia. Don’t want to talk
Somewhere a name crops up. Saint or beast.
Under the trees there is no shade. I walk barefoot.
Hungry dogs chasing the flies.
Humidity fills the eyes.
Silence of the night.
City has stopped running.
All the dead will speak now.
Not asking any revenge,
but peace for the living people.
Gert Strydom, 18 april 2016
When I do find no place of peace
then Lord, You are a place of rest to me
and in the depth of pain and disease
You do from all evil set me free
and in the depth of all my woe
when it feels as if I am dead,
when my hope and strength is low
You do still clear the way ahead,
even when it seems as if my world is destroyed,
when it seems that all that matter is gone,
that life is an endless bottomless void
then You do still lead on
and when my heart is broken and full of fear
You still do control my life’s tormented sphere.
Satish Verma, 18 april 2016
Long night will start the pincer movement;
pyrexia is rising.
Something like an extraterrestrial hand
digs deep in the mind to open the tomb
to unravel the tragedy of nuts and bolts
which could not fix
the mutation of the hour of death.
Dark blinking lashes of soul
measures the cliffs of silence
and then pours the hot red
vermilion in parted wisdom of sky.
The clang of bones again penetrates
the liver. The green flaming jelly of
innocent bellies.
The hyacinth is choking the village pond
hiding the corpses of precious flowers
with green blood.
One day foundation of skeletons will build a
temple of hope.
Satish Verma, 17 april 2016
Cell to cell a trapped apocalypse moves
breaking the taboo, deconstructing
the secret of body in chains
The myth explodes, offends the knowledge.
I know that I do not know myself.
Lacerating, ravishing the soil
the roots come out of air
to find the imprint of fruits.
I concede, I stop at the door of pain.
Hold me, when I tremble with stage fright.
My turn has come to speak the truth.
I have not made up my mind
to consume the light.
Garden takes a nap in the dark.
The boldness will face the dream
in length of time.
Satish Verma, 16 april 2016
Heart’s ache is getting worse everyday.
May be I go out in this brutal world
Of scuttling lies to seek the one
who left the body to trace the wound.
A red hibiscus enters my room from the window
and smiles at me.
Outside clumsy blasts are ripping apart
the tranquil day.
I wrench the emotions out of the poem
for the big mouthed kindness
which sprays the bullets.
Terror strikes suddenly on the swollen ankles
We do not know the cure.
No foreign hand will help,
No foreign face will smile.
I have to go for inward journey
My lips will kiss the condemned.
Satish Verma, 15 april 2016
When glacier recedes,
Your eyes start flowing,
and by the swollen river
an island is swallowed up.
You swim from the lake to the shore
of grief to err again.
Water was your home,
water is your life.
Soft marble swells up in deep crevices
of brain, shaking the foundation of
thoughts, naked as it is.
The fog sleeps on the sea for eternity.
The wrath of sky will burn the skeletons
buried in sand.
Summer will bring the violence.
You cry for forgotten greens,
and kelp and sailing ships
full of hops.
When the hymn recedes,
your eyes start flowing.
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