What is right?
What is wrong?
I no longer know.
Everything that seemed
So right, back then,
Everything,
Seems so terribly wrong now.
It didn’t seem this wrong
When news came to me
Through the prison walls
That my father died
Weak with hunger.
Nor when the word reached
That my mother and sisters,
They were starving, suffering.
My country’s freedom
Seemed worth everything
And maybe it is.
Then why, I wonder,
Why does the freedom
So hard won,
Feel so hollow now?
My hands, the same hands
That held the tricolour flag,
Has failed my family.
I won my motherland
Fighting together with thousands,
And on the way,
I lost my life,
I lost my family.
A new dawn of freedom
Has broken in India.
The sun of sovereignty
Has risen, victorius.
Never did my choices
Feel so wrong before.
Never did my sacrifices
Feel so huge.
Never before.
Now that freedom
Has been heralded
Through the doors of India,
And I have returned home,
And heard in whispers and yells,
And saw under the lantern
That my sister,
My dear sister,
She has sold her body
For a bite more bread.
***
Madras Courier originally ran as a broadsheet with a poetry section. It was a time when readers felt comfortable sharing glimpses of their lives through verse. If you have a poem you’d like to submit, do email us at [email protected].
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