A poem with a universality by Mamta. From coffee that two people have to the terror attacks in another continent, depicting the life and times of the now generation.

A round of coffee, baked delights and dimples

Celebrating youth

On a vacation high

Noisy clatter of cutlery and crockery

Heady chatter with eloquent dreams

The electric charge

Tickling the bond between friends

Laughing and shaking 

In mirthful abandon

Caught unawares

Their tender bodies

Fertile minds

Feisty spirits

Silenced by bullets

Still lingering on foaming cappuccino 

Blood and flesh 

Of innocence and terror

Mingled in pouring rain

Sealed in tiny caskets

Their eloquent souls riddled with questions

The serrated world has no answers.

In another Continent 
Like leitmotif
A Truck rams
Turning Bastille celebration into funerary moments
Footprints of terror running amok

Every sunrise torn by violence
Every sunset soaked in gore
A spasming gloom
Rendering survivours mute and quivering

The world has a new metaphors
Brutal and harsh
The machine guns, ballistic humans
Rape and plunder
Till the litany of violence
Becomes the pied piper of souls

As a child watches 
A pinwheel whirling in the breeze
Her mother drinking in his joy with her gaze
His father holding him close
That moment is scary
It’s tender and soft
It doesn’t belong to this world

The child

Ends up
With a body like a sieve
His mother and father
Buried in the stampede
The bright pinwheel damp
Crimson with his blood

No longer flutters.

©Mamta Joshi

Pix from Net.

Mamta Joshi

Mamta Joshi did her post graduation in History from University of Allahabad. She writes short stories, reflective essays, prose pieces on everyday life in national dailies and international e-magazines. She writes with equal ease in Hindi. For over two decades, as a teacher of English in college section at SMC, Allahabad, she has been interacting with young minds, understanding their pulse and in turn being savvy on technology, fitness, fashion, humour and rumour too.

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