Poetry

AP photo

By

Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi

Death

A soldier dies, but no one bothers.

They think that he gets paid for dying;

And some ideologues argue that

A man with a gun should eventually die,

While paying tribute to a terrorist

In their impressive theories

On Jihad.

Nothing new, only news

For media and viewers that run between,

Dissatisfied employees hectic schedules

And busy housewives’ soups break, and

The TRP fluctuates if slogans are low.

And some political leaders meantime

Speculate- how to make the death rather useful;

And some like shrewd businessmen

Become busy estimating costs per body.

The higher class doesn’t give a damn;

The lower bothers about inflation,

And middle class chooses the middle path:

Investing emotions in creative writing,

And other waits for a biopic on a soldier.

The price of a soldier increases after his death.

Balloon

You have given me a balloon, haven’t you?

By filling air in my stomach.

You said, “my seizures will cure,

If I allow you.”

Now beneath my mound, something crawls.

What happened to your balloon, you assured,

“It will protect.”

I forgot my periods, and now

It is too late.

So stately it ascends, and

My tensions are mounting perceptibly.

Soon it will struggle for breath,

The mere idea chokes me.

The creature will strain and spun,

So quick it happened, outside institution.

Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi

Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi is assistant professor of linguistics at Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University, India. His research interests include language documentation, writing descriptive grammars, and the preservation of rare and endangered languages in South Asia. He has contributed articles to many Science Citation Index journals.

His most recent books are A Grammar of Hadoti (Lincom: Munich, 2012), A Grammar of Bhadarwahi (Lincom: Munich, 2013), and a poetry collection titled Chinaar kaa Sukhaa Pattaa (2015) in Hindi.

As a poet, he has published more than 100 poems in different anthologies, journals and magazines worldwide. Until recently, his poem “Mother” has been published as a prologue to Motherhood and War: International Perspectives (Eds.), Palgrave Macmillan Press. 2014.