LAND’S SMELL

Our mouths go dry 
at midnight charter on papyrus leaf. 
Are we reverting back to pristine stone reliefs? 

How far we will go revolving around eclipse, 
stumbling on the phraseology of cosmos? 
Man was becoming inferior to beast. 

Who will walk on the bones of ancestors 
to dig out the truth from scriptures? 
The proud cows have become violent – 

separating milk from grass in agony. 
The perks were increasing the rifles. 
Freedom had fled away from the legacies. 

The split lips cannot speak coherently. 
Terror attacks were reaching there, where 
drenched amnesia wants to remember only door bells.

Satish Verma