Be done by as you did - the poem I read out, edited.

If anyone has a moment to spare
Listen, please:
They're killing our brothers and sisters like mice;
Some hide in the jungles to get away
From the death-bringers.

Don't Christians in Orissa have eyes?
Are they not human? Are you truly Advaits?
Do you really think you're Arjuns who've run
The gamut of the karmic wheel?
No. The Jaganath's chariot rolls on
And will crush beneath its mighty rim
Your women and children
Or make them join
The party of those you hated enough to kill.

History has many contrived, cunning corridors,
Blood violently sown always reaps its desire.
Not as one thinks. It turns against
The ones who made it unjustly stream.
See, see, Christ's blood streaming in the firmament.
One drop could have saved Faust but he just couldn't
Get hold of it, nor any drop.

I wish you'd taken a leaf out of Sree Narayana Guru's book
Who said in reply to Gandhiji's query
Should conversion be allowed?,
Whatever the religion,
It's enough man improves.
But you've probably never heard of Sree Narayana Guru.
If you'd been there at that conversation,
You'd have killed him.
Now you've appropriated him in my naadu.
The kind of pretentious thing quasi-intellectuals do;
What the Pharisees did with the prophets
After persecuting them.

George Bush Jr., Advani and Osama bin Laden
Saddam, Khomeini, Hitler and Stalin
Togadia and the Hindutva murderers,
And the Taliban and terrorists of every other hue
This plain-speaking, harsh, so-not-a-poem
Tells you the hell of hatred is all that's left to you
Unless metanoia comes, as it yet may, strangely,
Even as it did once to a Saul of Tarsus!

And you others who have never seen how
The maruts caressed their ordinary faces
The faces of the dead ones, green twigs snapped to pieces
So suddenly
Just as zephyrs still do yours
Or don't know they too heard the kisses of tender lips brush by
Touched thunder rolling across wild, green places
Tasted the nectar of raindrops on the sly
You who never smelled the scent of the Oriya Christian's sweat
To realize it had the same sweet, sour, tear-stained smell as in your armpits,
You indifferent ones, continue pretending until
One day they come for you too with their tridents
And there is no one left to help you by then
Because you purposefully did not intervene
(In your turning away from everything but your petty lives)
Though they were -only - Shylocks, like you,
Not trouble-makers going around
Carrying pictures of chairman Mao,
To make it with anyone, anyhow.

Nothing else I can do at present but write
& pray and love the Logos and believe.
I write all this just to let you know
I am trying to walk in the footsteps of the dead
And their loved ones whom you didn't consider human
The martyrs' blood relatives, their spiritual kin, and their wives and children
Who have to forgive you all, now
You and you and yours and yours
Like Staines' wife once publicly did.

Blood seeds the hearts of the next Generation.
Of those who are like-minded.
Like Jesus
Buddha, a nameless Zen master
Lincoln, Ramana Maharshi
Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
& Nelson Mandela and Tiananmen's students.

Behold, Mahabharath, I show you a miracle.
By the time your next pogrom comes around
Our tribes would have increased,
With rhyme, without reason.
Dark, sand- coloured cockroaches in your tumultuous barns,
Unquenchable, like your innocent children's eyes.
May they shine endlessly, in the play of lights,
Like little Chinese lanterns, like pretty Indian diyas
Or Mozart's twinkling stars that still make some of us marvel
In the distant reaches of the unfettered sky
Candling and beaconing us to some beautiful thing Else.

May man as he is today never set foot there
Except he dares to change beyond hatred's dare.

by A.V.Koshy