DEATH WILL COME WHEN WE LAUGH

I went to my hometown

For a poets’ assembly.

I said:

“What has changed

During the last forty years?”

The hill, or rather the rock

Known as Iringappara

Has been dug

Into a pond.

All the green of my childhood

The cornfields

Are now the groves

Of coconut trees.

Poverty has begun to pervade us

Someone robbed us

Of our paddy,

Our rice and our life.

And so life is lost.

My mother buried

Under a sandal tree,

Now bones and skull.

A poet wept for his mother.

Another for his children at school.

Older poets wept

For the love lost

Between Man and Man

Death will come when we laugh