THE CORPSES

The Emperor called his opponent

Corpse-eating animal!

The Emperor killed, despising corpses.

Every corpse once had a life

Once warm and loving, and hating too.

We read a biography that thrills us, and enthralls

With a history of a locale different from ours

The corpse is calm and composed,

The clock needles rhyme,

Time has a silent rhythm.

In the mortuary

Corpses are a phenomenon

Landless, nameless,.

The old mother moans in my dreams


How her beloved son strangled her

For a tiny piece of gold

So that he could go to a bar

Or to a local whore.

Corpses from the train crash

Drowned in the river

Were recovered by a finger raised above water level

Or from hair floating aloft.

Corpses from the tongues of flames

Deliberately caused by unfaithful men

Clotheless, skinless, they reverberate.

Corpses tell us how they died

From a stab, a shot, a fall,

A knock or strangulation;

Their wounds bleed even after petrifaction.

Surgeons stitch the wounds with grave respect,


With grim remorse on the death of young dreams,

The withering of the buds

Corpses smell differently,

A drowned one from a burnt one

Corpses petrified among rocks smell fear and agony.

Dead girls chuckle with bangles,

A ripe woman sings of the well where she drowned;

Death is not remorse, but a wound

To not only man, but to all creatures

Plants are felled, they cry, we don’t hear.

Animals are killed but are not wept or sung for

And there are many people who have died unsung

and unlamented

Who were rulers for long periods of time,

Who were singers while alive


Many deaths go unheard

Ignored by columns and notes,

Still they had lived their lives

As we live

Emperors are no more

A disheveled community

Disappeared into archives

Motioning to each other at the sight of a tourist

Or vending fish at the gates of great tombs

They had crowns, loved and hated

Feared and acted bravely.

Had a bowl of love been opened

The string of suicide would break,

Fathoms would come up to plains,

Flames would become breezes.


Every suicide was unwanted,

The surgeon and the poet know it.

Love is life and hate is death,

But life often hates.

Death can never hate...

A corpse is a calm, peaceful symbol

Of how life was