Remembering The Indian Ocean Tsunami Poem by Mohabeer Beeharry

Who knows when the flowers bloom
And why they go?
Having done their time,
They leave, quietly and bravely:
An intrinsic law,
An unbreakable tenet.
Who knows for whom the knell toll?
Who wakes up after a satisfying slumber
To confront inexplicable disasters?
What the next day brings is a mystery.
Sunshine or showers
Tears or pleasure
War or peace.
Ignorant of the cause,
We know the effects.
Fateful yet inevitable!
Fruits of our own actions and reactions.
Others call them accidents, dear children of our own mistakes.
My house was blown away
My baby drowned
And my mother,
Buried under rubbles!
These are not my doing, nor my mistakes,
Nor the things I wanted!
Why then do we need
By certain inexplicable force,
To lick our wounds,
Hopeless and broken, helpless
Waiting for the disoriented hope,
And strength to return, our achievement destroyed,
Our self confidence and courage battered?
Why, like the many civilisations
Gone before, obliterated,
Do we find ourselves stuck on the verge of disasters
Forlorn, deprived, broken and in despair?
Face, drenched with dusty tears,
Locked in internecine wars,
Bones shattered by loads of fallen debris?
We are human, sometimes too vainly blowing
Our supremacy over the environment!
Maybe we need to search deeper!
Maybe the secret of our strength and survival,
Is still there to be uncovered!
While we continue to glorify ourselves
In having appropriated it,
We forget that nature is infinite!
That we are only a minute part in this universe,
Smaller still without this earth;
There are far more things, innumberable laws and forces,
All unknown and beyond our limited scan,
Out there to be reckoned with.
We are not permanent residents here.
Nothing is eternal, neither us nor the things
We build or the things that surround us.
Pain and pleasure are the threads
That bind our existence to this place:
Frailty, in spite of our manufactured security,
Is at the base of this phenomenal fabric.
If we have what we want, we are happy!
Short of them, we are unhappy. This is delusion.
Still however great the pain,
Those changes have never ceased to occur,
Again and again
The same as it had happened from time
Buried in the dark past,
when time sprang from the great void
Into which all our civilisations were swallowed.
This is the way nature evolves: there is no sentiment there,
No change of mind and no waiting,
One mighty juggernaut,
Ruthlessly ploughing on.
In it love and patience, tears and happiness, strength and hope, dangers and devastations, war and peace
Are all intermingling and building elements.
The greatest justice we can do to ourselves
Is to be aware of them and accept them
As part of our own existence,
We are all part of a constantly recycling reality!
Remember those civilisations, towers and castles
That had once claimed eternity as their own,
They had crumbled and turned into dust.
Many a star and planet have disappeared
And many are those we held dear and close
Have had to succumb to this self-same
Onslaught of passing time
Who is there brave enough
To withstand this change?
Who dares to be permanent or eternal here?
Nothing is permanent and pretending that it is not so
Does not change anything.
Change is the natural nature of this place
A guarantee to its own reality and continuity!
It brings pain and sorrow,
But it also brings hope, joys and happiness in its wake.
To be here is to be at the mercy of these conditions.
The sooner we learn to live with them
The sooner we will be happy,
For happiness itself is relative.
Where there is happiness, there is bound to be sadness
This is where our strength as human beings is.
Knowing this secret and what is real,
We rise above the ash.
But who can replace my baby!
Who can bring my mother back.
Who could wipe off the pain
That gnaws at my heart?
Who could bring my old peaceful sleep back!
To wipe our tears and bravely march on, to continue with our life,
Is our fortitude, and
Our justification to survive as human.