How Shall I Scavenge these Innumerable Corpses

Srideep Mukherjee

Original: Biswanath Gorai, May 2021

The days and nights
Are no longer just so now.
They are transformed
Into lamentations heard at hospitals
Or are metamorphosed into those innumerable corpses floating on the Ganges with their faces turned downwards.

The agonised cries of humanity are never really translatable,
Nor are their fervent pleas and wails.
They only seem to swirl in rings and eddies for a while before assimilating into the eternal.
All around me the spoken word gets rekindled in pyres of words
And mass pyres light up in flames tinged with the sinister colours of incomprehensible contentious politics.
Meanwhile, the loss of dear ones stifles the cries of the living, who continue to burn from within.

“How shall I scavenge these innumerable corpses”!
The vulture wonders in dismay, and it no longer salivates.