In Humans Poem by Procyon Mukherjee

I am not lost

I am breathing here from the ashes

Of burnt wood, red ochre and mud

I am holding the slings beside me

To leap,

But midway I looked around

To see the darkness and soot

Turning within, softly



There are no roads but trees, branches moving from the ground up

Extending in every way, replacing stems or the roots that appear as creepers

They are unrestrained but in shock to

The pillage of every living being, not merely as a witness, taking part in it

Assisting but surviving

Is there a way to the sullen acceptance of what can be borne

And what must be resisted?



So much life but even more death awaits,

Power is sheepish acceptance of destruction

What is passed is remorse, its usefulness limited to the barren endeavours of the faithless traditions

This is not human

Therefore the animal will thrive

In humans, in everything we did not believe



The Buddha is silent

Sitting among the trees

The character mounts like a brazen statue

Nobody needs to know

But the gesture is firm, the beliefs are grounded among the ordinariness

Of a proposal

That which is about not this life alone

But the next, in the lives of others

In humans



I cannot look at your destruction

How beneath the flesh, the lifeless

Will be struggling to succeed

Beyond warmth, the stillness or the essence

Of what is bygone cannot be

Chanting in the hymns of sacrifice

I cannot look into

Anything that is besieged

While armistice is drawn among the quarters



My arm is weak, my forehead is wrinkled

The voice broken by one-man herd

The only whisper of significance

One single idea

Taking shape from the almost empty

Palette, is growing among the smaller wishes

Coagulating, sieving, rejecting but accepting

The broader color in humans