Shortchanged Lives Poem by G. S. Sharat Chandra

'You from India? Dreadfully poor place,
I was there for three weeks,
saw a dead boy on the street,'
gasps Mrs. Gentry,
sizing me with squinted eyes
as if to give more lens might tempt me
to dive into her yuppie life.

How can I tell her
I've nursed the starved, the forsaken,

or those on a parched afternoon,
that give up under a thin tree
or the shade of a culvert,
hallucinating a winged charpoy
to whisk them to swarga,
where gods line up
with handfuls of bliss to make up
for their battered mortality.