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!”
