WILTING AFTERNOON

Breaths droop down the dangling boughs

Along a sapped afternoon’s siesta

On the lap of a languorous November day

Whose dying  ambers lick the bougainvillea

In their soft , delirious sway

Looking for an ecstasy in the wind’s chequered  way.      

The birds in the tree-hole look on

As if in a dazed stupor

With prayers muttered to Goddess Chandi

To cure the millennium city of malarial fever

And  weeping sores all over ;

When you call me from the distant wilds

Of crazy islets on river

Where fire too often fuses with water

To the charmed spectacle of Nature .

Without knowing how on the crust here

Hunger bullies us every now and then

At the behest of a fearful  thunder

That derides  our hollow spiritual fervor .

Comp. n copy right : saroj k. padhi

19/11/14