Did you watch the news today?
It was all over the network.
Broadasting the horrors of bloodshed.
The war is back,
The playgrounds are gone.
Can you see the bloodstains
On the swingset Raoul’s mother
Bought him for christmas last year?
Can you see? Can you hear?
There are women and children crying on the streets.
The boys have all been sent to war,
Two hundred and seventy three died
Yesterday in this town alone.
Is there a place I can go,
A place I can escape to?
Where I can read this book in peace?
Peace, I say the words and my neighbour laughs.
That is a word that has been lost in time.
The sirens go off every morning,
And we scramble off to the basement,
The bombs are here, the enemy is at the gates.
Do you remember when we had to ask Mother
If we could stay up after 10 pm?
That was a luxury I gave away.
If only I could sleep at 10 pm again,
Without fear of the barrel of a gun at my temple.
The pain, oh the pain.
Life has turned into a desert
I visited two summers ago.
There was a girl.
I think of her sometimes,
I think of what could have been if this war wasn’t real.
Maybe she would have been real.
Seldom do we get what we want.
The things we fear,
Our nightmares emerge out as reality instead.
The television so kindly tells us where the war is now.
I knew his mother, I knew his brother,
And the blonde one, I went to high school with her.
Familiar faces on the TV.
It would have been exciting if I saw them
At some other time, and without lifeless eyes
Being carried away from places torn down by this battle.
Bombs.
They unexpectedly come and they take away what’s dear,
But I’m still here.
Still hiding in this basement.
Thinking of the desert sand seeping through my hand
Of the time when I held her hand.
She had a beautiful smile.
Are you here to save me from the war?
To take me to a place where i can finally
Read this book?
It tells the story of a young man
On a desert trip,
And a girl who destroyed him.
A girl named war.
There’s a knock on my door.
She is here.
Maharshi Bhattacharya