Resurrection Poem by anujan raja

RESURRECTION


I sat there feeding the chips
Into the crude atuppu*
The chips
Dark red, brown, black, pale yellow and buff,
All burnt brightly.
I watched the fire
There was hardly any smoke,
Only heat and light
The heat and light from the past.

I was sorely aware
These are fragments of my ancestry
I just sat there
Watching the chips burn
The orange flames danced,
Leaped up into the air
There was hardly any smoke,
Only heat and light
The heat and light from the past.

A strange tingling sensation I felt,
An uneasy thrill felt along my heart,
Was I in a kind of trance?
I felt the heat swamping my body,
The light dazzling my eyes
No smoke! I wondered,
Only heat and light
The heat and light from the past.

Ancient edifices rose before me
Palaces and mighty fortresses
Kings, princes and princesses,
Walked here and dreamed here
All gone and forgotten
Trampled into the dust of time.
Can you read unwritten history
From the little heaps of ashes?

The lovely architectural achievements
Little known to strangers
Reduced to little brown bits in my hands.
Iron-hard and berry-brown
Burnt so brightly
With hardly any smoke.
I gazed into the heart of the flames
I saw faces.

The chips burnt brightly
I saw many faces,
Pale faces, brown, white, dark,
And even black faces
Staring at me unwinkingly
Scared was I a little
But self-assurance came instantly,
They are my ancestors.

I tried to imagine how
They lived and walked
Laughed and cried
Argued and quarreled
Dissented and compromised
Men and women
Of a bygone time,
Like me, they were- my ancestors.

The funeral pyre burnt brightly
Destroyed their last physical presences
The fire burnt them all
Into mere memories
I looked back longingly,
I do not know why
The haze of the past parted,
I saw many faces.


Pale faces, indeed they were,
Behind the ancient pallor
Their real selves stared me in my face
I was swept away by a scary feeling
Shivering in their ghostly presences
Visions fantastic troubled my mind
I closed my eyes and kept’em closed,
And escaped the terrible spell.

Little Ozymandiases,
Some of them thought they were
They ruled their own little kingdoms.
My ancestors they were
Dead and gone long, long ago
Their exploits and misadventures
Now seldom remembered
Heroes of forgotten history.
I have heard their names mentioned
With awe and trepidation,
Their exploits and their glory
Weighed down later generations
Some tried to feel proud, but couldn’t,
They didn’t care about past glory
They had to live their lives
Like other people of their time.


The fire still burned bright
Orange flames still danced
The faces had vanished
I thought of the other worlds
And felt a sense of loss,
You know you don’t have
Access to their shadowy world
Your destiny is only to wait

Atuppu: Malayalam word for an improvised cooking fire built with three stones forming a triangle.