The Newer Contortions of Newness

Through the threshold of the restless night,
barged in a deluge.
A new day it was
brimming with brimless hope,
it flooded the desperate world.
And then everybody drank.
But ignored was the flotsam of the past
it carried into this newness.
Amidst the proclamation of a new era,
besides the figure of the rocketing sensex,
atop the claims of a burgeoning economy,
dwarfed by a meeting of cultured socialites,
sabotaged by the achievements of capricious young
I noticed her-sitting on haunches.
On the background was her newly burnt house
which was the foreground of her misery;
old, decaying,dying and yet alive
to face a bitter new winter
without a family or a shelter.
And those rioters
whom she had known all along.
Those known faces were arabesques
of hatred-that primal feeling,
but newer were the convolutions.
New faces trapped in an older orchestration
the politics of “isms”.
In new age feudalism:
industrialism
land grabbing , forced eviction,
distraught beings
and a new age of desperation
was creeping into my being
as I flung the newspaper away.


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