Painful Life Poem by Ravinder Kumar Soni

I never knew,
Many years after my death
I could still exist,
Captured in a photograph.
Do you know,
I had died in the Bengal Famine,
Of 1943;
The original Black and White photograph
Published in The Statesman
And preserved by the Indian Archives,
Shows me, lean and withered,
As I lay on a Midnapore street, dead.
A fierce cyclone had destroyed,
Its coastal walls;
I knew the dead was me.
I do not remember that life,
The same way I want to forget,
I live.
Life is painful; the immanent death more so.
How can there be peace and ease,
For me,
When I am an embodied soul.