"FACINGFACES 2002 - 04" SELECTED POETRY

FEATS OF COURAGE

Feats of courage and the heroic death.
For the cause country or the desert zones.
Peeping voices low under old stony building.
In wake of the retreating armies of the Rhone.
On the hill an impregnable fortress.
On the ground a mound of hay and mud.
The battering of bats against the window.
In ruins destroyed by the war of mammon.
Give us a change of seasons.
A little pause of breath after the sunrise.
Two and two along bundled hay stacks.
An undamaged barn along the ground...
Looking across the high window there is a landscape
stretching across the fields.
But the internal bonds of prison keep tying.
The gaze inwards towards the shields.
Facing the demigods of death and destruction.
Muzzled up rifles wolf dogs punitive camps.
In the verse a demolition a smouldering ash.
To counteract the poisons of the times....


THERE WAS NO ONE.

There was no one
Only the sound of my footsteps
Or perhaps the sound of my breath
Disturbing some wandering brief
A tone wedged in whispering grief.


There was no one, only a shadow
Walking on the incumbent street
Memories of pathways going stray
With hands held in an evening greet.


Perhaps only in footsteps of the lost
In dances of the rains of whirling trot
Murmurs of north in dirges of drain
Hungers of the earth in cities of pain.


CHILDREN PLAY.

The children play in the sunshine
In a nascent dawn born of baited bliss
Three pronged foot webs in the sand
Of creatures hungry in the meddler nights.

The dreams that hold immensity of night
Forms sound- sculpted in zones of skies
Strivings born of the search for unknown
Wandering wind in passing left a message.
Shorn of chains in straining culprits of hill
Robbers of lives constrained by prouder will.

The children play in the moonlight
In nutant nights born of burdened bliss
Three panthers striding across the plains
Casting their shadows under starry hiss.


DO NOT WANT TO TURN.

I do not want to turn again
Where oft I have trodden in my days
When the sounds of my footprints imprints
Crimson blood stained mouths of memories.

Purple trafficking in the humdrum streets
Where nothingness enforces reinacted designs
Tongues burnt by hearts of scorpioned flames
Among florid furies of the beleaguered nights.

What has come over me in the dew of dawn
Scorched hands plucking at the blistered eyes
Golds of harvest now stored in shadowy deep
In frigate of serpents steeped in venom kind.

I do not want to turn again
Seeking out the comforts of hope or sleep
In some vacant spaces of the charnelled fields
Where dazed desires suspend in vagrant deeds.



Durlabh Singh
Kenya-UK
copyright.2002

Durlabh Singh is a poet based in London and has been widely published, among the publications four books of verse.
His aim is to revitalize poetry with new expressions depicting
realities of our time.