A Moment of Silence

I feel the deepest sympathy for those parents, relations and siblings who lost loved ones on 9/11/2001. Acts of terror can never be justified. Mother Earth saw a calamitous and totally avoidable Holocaust on 9/11. Inevitably this poem will be misinterpreted by the unseeing naked masses and Machiavelli’s

children. Those who desire to do so will engage in waywardness anyhow. No apology rendered.

This poem seeks to draw a wider awareness to the anguish and affliction victims undergo every ticking moment on life’s clock. None should be stalwartly myopic to overlook acts of war and atrocities waged by politicians, and ghastly governments. Victimization is never a one-sided street. This is what the media willfully overlooks. And shall carry on doing so as lives dissolve like particles.


Surely my ears are clogged with wax?
You want a moment of silence for the victims of 9/11?

Let me also suggest a lifetime of silence
For the Palestinians whose existence is on a knife’s edge in the West Bank and Gaza
Decades of occupation maims them from normality
Standing on the Dome of the Rock making quixotic pleas for freedom
The rock’s crude layering of foliation is buried deep
Like the aspirations of 5 million souls hankering for a Homeland

Paper tigers from Oslo
Pawns as potent as pitiful peons
Palestinians pelting stones on passing vehicles
The knife of hatred still mutilates
Nothing sedates Palestinian nightmares of flames
No one will be hauling the rope, when the bells in Jerusalem toll
And when they toll deafened will be the eardrums of misguided anticipation

You desire a moment of silence for the victims of the World Trade Centre?
Why not also have 10 years of silence for the decade long embargo on Babylon. A once Blessed Baghdad now pregnant with torture and killing.
A million and a half years of silence for the million and-a-half Iraqi people, mostly children, who have died of starvation

Menace and macabre malnourishment in Mosul
Bodies brutally bombed in Baquba
Fear in Falluja. Rape in Ramadi
Iraq is where death pours down like rain and peels every coating of concrete Every layer of skin
Only destiny and Karma will judge the dismantling of justice
The Disregard for humanity

Why not mourn for the dead victims of Kashmir?
The wail of a valley. A valley where too many tears turn to blood
Pornography of repression in Pulwama
Musharrafs and Manmohans masquerading seemingly altruistic rhetoric Slogans bound to play well with the media
Border coaches. Rail services. Bilateral air links.
Blasphemous lip-service when lines of control plague
Where hundreds bite the dust.

Their names, like the corpses they once represented, piled up and conveniently slipped off our tongues.
Srinagar is where Our eyes are stapled shut
It is where snipers shoot people dead
It is where soldiers are hostage to ill-begotten moral duties
Siachen is where a glacial sky solicits the sun to come out and swab its tears

One question to chew on till the flavour goes insipid:
Are US intransigence and Osama’s arrogance not two sides of the same coin? Both are hunters with hungry intent.
Any diplomat attired to the nines embarking on the voyage of war can measure the tides he will encounter.
The soft-spoken statesman who yields to war is as much a persecutor as the bearded caped-crusading tyrant cocooning in caves

Countless are the calculating eagles who descend from the Pentagon and Mazar-e-Sharif to live with moles that they may know the secrets of the earth and wreak havoc.
A tongue-tied President
Or a suicide-tied beard?
Both lieutenants of lunacy
Surely the tailor sees the two erroneous sides of
the cloth he weaves?

Mourn for the Argentinos- the Desaparecidos
Don’t cry but Mourn for Argentina
Mourn from 1976 to 1983
The scent of burning fuel in Buenos Aires
Bones buried in it. Babies born of it.
Porteños and Porteñas whose vidas vanished like a Houdini act
Pin-drop silence for 30,000 days
Pin-drop silence for Pinochet’s 30,000 victims and 17 years of massacre
An hour of silence for the Zapatistas in Mexico
An afternoon of silence for Colombia’s San Andrenos
A month of silence for the Mayans in the land of Guetmaltecos ...
45 months of silence for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas ...

Los Latinos stumble upon their graves far subterranean in the ocean than any skyscraper could poke into the sky.

This NEVER intended to be a 9/11 poem
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
It is a 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem
A 9/6 poem
A 9/5 poem

Verity be spoken: it is a 1492 poem.
The very reason for this poem to be written in the first place
This is a 786 poem. And all that it represents

This is also a September 11th poem for Chile in 1971
A September the 12th poem for Steven Biko in South Africa, 1977
A September the 13th poem for the Attica Prisoners of 1971.
A September the 14th poem for Somalia in 1992.
Black hawks in Baqara Market
This is a poem for every date that cascades to the earth in ashes
A poem for the 110 stories that went untold
The 110 stories that history omits from glossy textbooks
The 110 stories that Machiavelli’s Children AKA
CNN, CBN, C-SPAN, CBS, FOX, NBC, AP,
The Times and Newsweek ignore
This poem intends to interrupt sound bites and column inches

And still you seek a moment of silence?
We could give you a lifetime of empty silence
Embellished with unmarked graves
Lost languages. Uprooted trees and histories
Blind stares on the faces of nameless children

So you want a moment of silence?
But for how long?
Till we are left speechless
Till our tongues are snatched from our mouths
Should we remain silent forever?
Or just long enough to hunger
Ourselves to death

If you need a moment of silence
Then bring to a halt the oil pumps
Turn off the engines. Switch off the plasmas
Sink the cruise ships. Shut the Bloomberg terminals
Crash the stock markets. Unplug the GE lights.
Delete the text messages. Derail the trains.
Disconnect the fibre optics.
Intellectually tear down the light-houses
The White Houses
The jailhouses
The Penthouses
The Pentagons
The Playboys

But leave the poets.
Whose innocuously magnetic poetry will remain
On the frozen refrigerator of our consciousness ...

If you want a moment of silence
Then take it from the echo of my voice
The pounding of my heart
Take it In the pause between numbing all pain
In the handshakes of spineless leaders beyond reproach
In the marches of militaries stumbling blindly behind

But tonight, we will keep on screaming
Keep on slaying
Keep on singing
For our dead.