Uninvited Guests Poem by Vadakkumpurath Ramesan

He leaned on the mud wall
Of his hay thatched hutment
With his eyes fixed at the horizon
With no expectation of the return
Of his son and daughter
Whom the men on horseback
Took forcibly to the wilderness
To train and to send to explode!

He leaned as the wall with knee-folded
And hands bracketed the legs
As the vision of soldiers were caught
By his fading sight of grey eyes,
But sat in stone like posture
When his emotions hanged around cliff
That hovered by maddened swirl
Of ups and downs of unrelenting sorrow

He was quarantined and questioned
At gun-point by the olive green clad
Warriors in combing the elements of uprising
They quizzed and quivered with interrogation
Yet yeilded no word from his lips
No change in his mood or posture
But to the exhaustion of armed men
Who under command is in mission
To meet a fire-bran militant
And his aids to create turmoil.

His mind travelled
From the familiar to unfamiliar
From the known to unknown
In search of his lost son and daughter
But as days passed with no word
News spread of a blast in the village
Where he walked with his stick
To the crowd that circled
The mangled corpse of the blowm up
Where the soldiers took the IDs
Of the human bombs from the debris
That testified that it was his hopes
That smashed all and perished themselves
Under the command of the beast!
He lit the hay-hut
With the lone stick in the match box
And laid himself in his cot
As of a corpse on the pyre-lit