uday balakrishnan - FRAGMENTS

Ruins and what are they?
A mass of stones
Shattered battlements
Crumbling old temples
Broken pottery in a museum
Roofless dwellings
From a very distant past….
Or a recent attack.

Mortars and bombs
Short circuit time
Creating an instant past
For an un-rememberable future
And then there will always be the archaeologist
‘Oh they made a fire there and
War all around’.

‘They read books and burnt libraries…’
Is what she will let you know
In that matter of fact objective kind of way...
Bits of memory interpreted for us.

But nothing will ever tell the story
From a broken home
Or a family that sizzled away in a rocket attack
Or just vanished with the grenade….
Now leave it to the historians
To mop all that up ….
They do it all the time.

uday balakrishnan

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/fragments-5/