My Bible!

Oh! Man
He is as good as any other poem
Disturb your conscience, was Eliot afar;
When he clear his throat
You will know, he is about to make you clear
Of all the doubts that you think hampers you grow a man
There is no hymn of Amen or Ibudou Pakhangba
But he knows where is Burma and what did our little sister did,
There is No Waste Land, there is no any Byzantium
For him, Tiddim Road bleeds at Malom.

No wonder,
I count myself an educated, civilized and a worthy patriot
With my untamed poems on death and its loose conclusions
That someday I ought to die in her lap
One among her numerous sons!

Oh! Man
There were nights I thought of him, and I got
Dreams stoic and dreaded like a pineapple in Churachandpur
All eyes but blind
And I laughed
What have I done,
In fact, Oinam High School wasn't too far
Few rapes and a lake of sorrow.

Let’s laugh a while and celebrate...
Only yesterday, he is back from the killing fields of Manipur
And he brought a book in the name of our lost literature
That sang Kwairamband Bazar and its many crooked by lanes
With each name spelled like a Gandhi and Nehru
And I wished to give each sojourn a definitive verdict.

On the Kanglasha and its Sahebs
But, look at him
He brought a book, few pages old and wrought in the mist of Sahitya,
A book seasoned with extinct Lamgi Chekla and Pi Thadoi;
Each word I uttered with drunken wisdom,
It proclaimed a bible for Apaiba Thawai!

Help me, I wanted to cry
Help me, I wanted swear
And this Bible, within each imprints,
I seek a vigour, a new morning
Sometimes I thought sacrosanctfor its sake, but what do I do
That’s non-native, in the land of Sanskrit hymns and Bengali script
Oh! He brought this book
That’s bible for me
That speaks of Chaoba, Kamal and Meenaketan;
Tonight, my drunken wisdom says
Embrace it tight
This is my Bible
A Bible surfaced by Akhu!

***(July 20, 2009)***