TEDDY BEAR ON THE WAR FRONT
(News Report from Irpin, Ukraine, 2022)
The teddy bear sits benumbed
presiding over the rubble
Of civilisation
Of compassion
Of humanity
A debris of fun and play
Teddy sits smirking over the
Skeleton of the cat, her
Bones, a curled cadaver
Her couch and cushions
in smithereens
The house shredded by the missile
Walls cracking and crumbling with the
Child’s screams as shards
From the tiny throat
Teddy bear, the dumb survivor,
No arms to melt his frozen heart
Watching the carnage with
Big round buttons
gyrated into unseeing eyes
Wrapped in grief
The gentle wool on Teddy spikes
The bristles stand stiff and sharp
Rivers of tears flow
Into the turbulent ocean
And a tsunami of teddy bears
Marches into the war zone
Looking for children to comfort
TELLING VIGNETTES
It’s dementia…
For grandmother
It’s a staccato war
Ends each day and
Starts the next morning again
it is a re-wind
to World War II
the wake of bombing
kills people seventy years later
*
Pregnant with deadly nightmares
Moskva the missile cruiser sank
The Black Sea swallowed all her bombs
Stuffed with a thousand deaths
*
Bullet marks on the walls
remnants of war
people in homes behind
unhealed
*
Ghosts born of bombs
are stripped of death
Sans the mortal attire
They live on to haunt
*
The web of nerves on
the inert dog’s neck
pulsates
with lifelessness
It’s wartime
*
More live than the forlorn dog
are the shadows of bullets on
the walls of Irpin
Deep craters on the earth
hold silence
born of the boom
*
They are not moon craters
These on the earth mark
technology of warfare
Massive progress
in hunting and
getting the big kill
Sukrita Paul Kumar, former Fellow of Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, held the prestigious Aruna Asaf Ali Chair at Delhi University. An honorary faculty at Corfu, Greece, she was an invited resident poet at the prestigious International Writing Programme at Iowa, USA. Her most recent collections of poems, are Vanishing Words, Country Drive and Dream Catcher. Her critical books include Narrating Partition, The New Story and Conversations on Modernism. She has co-edited many books, including Speaking for Herself: Asian Women’s Writings (Penguin). An Honorary Fellow at HK Baptist University, Hong Kong, she has published many translations and has held exhibitions of her paintings. Currently she is series co-editor of “Writer in Context” volumes being published by Routledge UK and South Asia.
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