Axis & Allies - damowords

Commando
Ajmal lay frighten’d in the grey‐white bed
Interrogated in native Urdu
This was no paradise, he should be dead,
His promised concubines a camera crew;
“Why are you here”
”Which group calls you member”
Ajmal’s voice answers clear, “Lashkar‐e‐Taiba!”
Since Babri Mosque was set aflame
Setting KARMA in arrears
All Mumbaikers mused on that name
Terrorized for fifteen years
& with that name death always came,
Blood, suffocation, tears
BEST busses blasted by the teeming trains
On anniversaries as vengeance reins.
Ajmal thought of his family
Back home in Faridkut
How they would be when they could see
His part play’d in the plot
The vital bit of give to unravel a sailor’s knot.
Mumbai
Mystic Mountain
As I ascend those smooth, bouldering slopes
My spiritus smouldering with desire
All history & all my heartfelt hopes
Kindle fresh sparks of man’s immortal fire;
My lips slow parch
As patterns they rehearse,
The long resounding march of old, heroic verse.
I have reach’d the sacred summit
Oer Thiruvannamali,
With the inkpen of the poet
& a mind of the Magi,
Awaiting some untroubl’d fit
That deities supply,
To gently come into my feeble breast
& this too‐high‐a‐flight feel it infest.
I sit cross‐legged, folded arms
A third eye opens wide,
Beyond the farms, Pondy’s gendarmes,
The Bay of Bengal’s glide,
My vision drives deep into space t’where sayer‐stars abide.
Arunachala