A late message: Mother's Day

Mere words will not help,

Real change/deed required,

Mothers being abused, ignored, forgotten

Across a monetized world,

And conveniently

Dispatched to old people's homes,

When they needed families the most

In the sunset of their lives;

Sadly they get completely erased from minds,

A fading picture in an old album in a dusty pile,

Being erased and sent to oblivion

By their own, the ones nourished in caring wombs!

A line or emoticon will not

Help remove the deep scars,

Perhaps, a long-delayed visit to her

Costly home peopled by memories grey

 Or

A loving call to an aging heart

Will sure revive a smile on a furrowed face,

Lighting up eyes that see but dimly,

The splendors of a lovely spring outside,

A closed window of a cubicle shared by one more

Doddering inmate in a flowery gown,

Go and hug that solitary woman,

Surviving on pills, prayers and occasional chats,

The frail person that always

 Stood by you in happiness and pain,

And guarded you against odds and bullies

Like a roaring lioness.

 A Real Happy Mother's Day to all!

Bring back our girls---and a country

Out of the depths of darkness came sinister forces
Of pure evil
And took away innocence in the budding form
Of young teen girls from a government-run school
In Chibok, Nigeria, on April 14,
The 276 girls brazenly abducted by the Boko Haram gunmen
In retaliation---they do not want them to be educated and independent,
all in the name of their version of Islam and this ambush, a warning for others---
The hapless girls are still missing…like many others in that lawless country,
And most likely to be sold as slaves on the market as per their leader Abubakar;
The world so far has not cared for these children,
As strongly as it should have done, simply because
They come from an impoverished nation, dark and distant,
In an unstable region known for endemic violence;
Why should the ruling elites care for the Other?
The disappeared ones, after all,
Are black, poor and girls, and
Not from a rich and mighty Western nation, their own;
The social outcry on social media forcing now a slow re-think
Among the international governments that regularly talk of human rights and their violations in various hot spots in despotic parts other than their own courtyards,
The great democratic leaders that can make a difference
Have not yet
Hardly talked in a single voice of anger and moral outrage;
Then, in such a bleak scenario of grim helplessness,
Let us rise,
You and I,
As We,
The disenfranchised netizens,
The remaining 99 percents of the world,
Against any kind of oppression and exploitation,
We are the new army of the
Literate and hard-working professionals,
Let us raise our voice in anger,
For our trapped young sisters and daughters, now in another jungle,
The emerging solidarity should now grow into a global protest/chorus persistent,
Against this ruthless kidnapping and global human trafficking of girls and children.

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Fall painting

The tree

In fall,

A mass of leafless

Branches;

Crooked

Straight,

Tender

Thick,

Radiating outwards

Like sharp lines in a drawing,

In a wavy plain;

A masterpiece planted there

By the famed Guo Xi;

The scene, desolate, still

Creating serenity

In the viewer

Even

From afar.