Broken Ground

Last night I stood on a wide open field

Covered with rubbish. The ruined walls of a bombardment

Tattered blue polythene from a refugee camp

With a child’s doll

Poking its head out from under it

To see if it was safe to come outside.

It was a field without a blade of grass

Watered with no water, 

Where nothing grew

But broken stone.

And around, streets hummed with traffic

Cars and shops and people.
Life moved on.

I stood on this open field

And looked down on a wooden board

Half-stuck under a block of stone.

Perhaps a shop’s broken signboard

Perhaps a message from the Universe.

All I knew was, this was what I’d come to find

It was very important to me

And perhaps to everything, else as well.

Then it was that God and Heaven came up to me. Two sad men

Once tall, now bowed, with drooping moustaches

And hollow eyes.

They came to me on that broken ground

And looked at me and said - 

“We surrender, we have lost.

We admit it. Take us prisoner

And do with us what you will.”

So I said to them, “I can’t. I don’t have time.

Please find someone to surrender to.

And don’t drop sweet wrappers on the ground.

It’s already littered enough."

And then I went on trying to free the board

And a corrugated sheet of iron

Leaned sideways, and fell

With a hollow clang.

(This was actually a dream from last night. Interpretations welcome.)

Copyright B Purkayastha 2014