A city robbed of its music

A poem on corona lockdown

by Anurag Minus Verma

Parks empty,

deserted even by the best of lovers,

cars on the parking lot

standing,

finally at ease,

like homeless men lounging on the beach.

Nothing moves on the road,

Streets and buildings like still photographs

Birds gliding over the city,

So many of them

giant screams of malnourished crows,

few sparrows chirping out of boredom,

and then this ghost city,

Takes the shape of a gloomy video on pause.

nowhere to go in the morning,

no aimless strolling in the city.

a city robbed of its rhythm

a city robbed of its music.

Jobless men locked in their home

alone or with their wives,

some smoking cigarettes on the balcony,

Listening to the radio, retro 70’s songs

about broken days

broken nights

and how nostalgia

slips by

riding on the breeze

one fine evening,

as the sound of email notification buzzes,

“ This is a tough time and we can’t provide any salary from next month. But we all are together in this and we will come out stronger “

Evening turns into night

news flashes new deaths, new infection

number of people who have died,

and the number of people who will die,

Numbers

and more numbers

and the whole

world like a giant

hospital.

A lady in the nearby apartment stays alone with two dogs

her kitchen sink,

clogged with

leftover food,

utensils,

a small pond built on the sink

she looks at her reflection in the water,

a face like rose dried inside the pages of pulp literature,

And she tries to flush it down

with the forks,

with an old toothbrush,

but it won’t drain, stays there like an uninvited misery,

all of a sudden it all goes down.

in one go

“ whoosh”

like an uninvited misery.

Late in the night dogs on streets

have joined together

barking, screaming, crying

because of hunger,

cats too cry late at 1 am,

like young children

who have seen ghosts,

ghosts smiling with shining pink knives.

We are all in it,

all marked on the hit list,

the hurricane may any time approach at the doorstep

like a hired assassin.

or perhaps soon

new beautiful sunshine will appear,

which no one has seen before

and out of nowhere,

all the piled up melancholy

will go down the sink.

“Whoosh!”