India

India

The wonders of a land that still is filled
with all the riches human hands and minds
had wrought in ages past – the thoughts and crafts,
the songs and dances that enriched the lives
of our ancestors – these, we've long ignored,
accepting, as our own, the foreign garb
of those who came to plunder, aping ways
of distant lands – and even spurning speech
of parents for the tongues of conquerors
who long have left in body, leaving us
with one more layer yet to add to those
the settlers and the raiders past had laid,
from Arya tribes to Central Asian hordes –
with every foreign vice accepted, while
our own remained, with virtues rarely learned
of those who came, while native ones were spurned –
and from our actions and the ones before
there rises, like a strange, familiar dream,
our India, this, the country dear we love,
that’s filled as much with wonder as with woe,
where sorrows new are overlaid on old,
where justice rarely, in a life, is found –
that yet remains for us our hallowed ground,
on which, in peasants' phrases, you will find
the wisdom of the seers of the past
and in the laughter of the tribals you
will hear the echoes of the ages yet
and all the innocence that still remains
untouched at heart by streams of filth that flow
from sources old and new to settle, dank,
on sediments that build the rock below.

2015 January 11th Sat. 9:37 am
Brooklyn, New York