The Death Of The Ploughman Poem by Saheb Mohapatra

When the sun was out on that wintry morning
And all boughs were cloaked with woe,
The village ploughman marches forth winning and winning
Against a fatal fate and with a heroic hoe.

Tall and strong, with a chest so wide,
He marks in life his woeful way,
And like a man of wits he is to hide
The wisdom of sheer dismay.

As time into the lap of the day goes deep,
So deep that it is hidden never,
The smiles of the ploughman and his elated lips
By his very own road forever.

The sun, quite fed up with the chilliness of time
Acts as onlookers o'er his field,
And then appears with the disappearing rime
The pictures of his futile yields.

Tight he holds the gazes of grief
With footsteps of demise near,
Whose hands of eternity are to be brief:
Death takes the hands but of the poor.

The strains of the dirge all asked to wait
Too the miasmic skies of rhyme,
All the shackled and frail doctors of fate
Wail deep on the banks of time.

The village ploughman, so stout, within an endless slumber
Ends up with a painful ease,
And on the saddles of time loses for ever
The disrupting warmth of the breeze.

The shrieks of his boy can even not wake
A man webbed in oblivion of weeps,
His very own roads never see him coming back:
A full cup of tears he sips and sleeps.

And thousands like him pass with fleeting years
And thousands death demand,
For they are to drench with their very own tears
The barrenness of their lands.

All these march to the grave and stand
Beneath the clouds of cremating rime,
They shed their tears onto their very own hands
As night drinks the broth of time.