Thousands of syndicates roam the dark arteries,
hunting the alleys, the colleges, the universities—
a predatory presence, thirsting for fresh blood.
The brilliant pillars of light are flickering out.
They scatter in a frenzy of terrible joy,
leaving only the glint of armed eyes in the dark.
The gray pages of history break loose, flying into the sky,
their luminous letters catching fire—
even King Kanishka’s stone head
is lost to the rubble.
Deep in the night, a shadow stays awake,
poring over Bismarck’s foreign policy,
devouring the lifelines of Hitler and Mussolini.
The architecture of this hour is being written
by their very hands, balanced precariously
on the blood-stained shoulders of the mob.
Yet humanity once converged from a single source—
where the Indus and the ocean bled into one great civilization.
If you must write the biography of a river,
write instead of the ecstatic festival of its sand grains.
A singular point takes its seat between my eyes,
stained in the bleeding colors of a sunset—
mirroring the constellations of dots
mapped by the master, Syed Haider Raza.
In the texts of Tantra, a poet once witnessed
how the current of consciousness, condensed to a point,
electrifies the cold weight of a corpse;
how it leaped directly into the roaring pyre,
where a woman, dense as a drop, burned to ashes
like a collapsed masculinity—
much like how Duryodhana’s pride was shattered,
and how the arrogant rulers of our own time
are brought to ruin, day after day
***
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 editor@madrascourier.com.
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